>The FSF view is that Debian supports non-free because non-free is
>hosted on the same servers as main. In the FSF view non-free appears
>the same as experiment and backports do. See their official statement
>here. This has also been discussed many times on different lists.

Please understand that while I hold the ideals of the FSF in good regard, their endorsement means very little in the practical sense of real life. Take something like Fedora, which refuses to package non-free code. It is relatively useful, until you need flash support, non-free firmware for video and wireless hardware, or video and audio codecs. Simple fact is that if you do things the FSF way, you end up with a crippled system with limited usability.

Fedora attempted to solve this with third party repositories, but in my experience third party repositories have QA issues. I’ve seen Fedora’s Livna and Suse’s PACMAN repositories have really awful package consistency problems from time to time.

If I might venture an observation, Devuan’s time would be best focused on building a core with as few usability issues as possible. This would mean having the proper kernel firmware. The rest of the Debian repository can wait until that core is established.