On Wed, Jun 03, 2015 at 01:39:21PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 03, 2015 at 08:37:22PM +1200, Daniel Reurich wrote:
> > I'd like a straw poll on whether we should include non-free firmware in our
> > installers by default.
>
> If we were ok with unmodifiable undebuggable unfixable software, we'd be
> using Windows.

Sometimes it's a question of alternatives.

(a) On some systems there may be none.

(b) On some systems the free alternatives may have unacceptble performance.
Of course, 'unacceptable' fot the installer differs from
'unacceptable' for the end use.

(c) Finally, one may be willing to put up with unmodifiable
undebuggable unfixable software knowing that if it ever becomes a
problem, one can replace it by a (possibly less performant) free
alternative.

And one might still, even though one accepts a small amount of nonfree
software, went to eschew Windows, which is *all* nonfree.

I do not even know whether there are nonfree drivers running on my
Debian Jessie machine. I do know that everything on it can be
driven with free drivers, and that if the nonfree drivers ever become
nonfunctional, and are consequently dropped from Debian (and its
derivatives), there will be a clean transition to free ones.

My laptop was the *first* ASUS EEEPC that could run without
proprietary drivers (even though it was sold with Windows
preinstalled). I refused to buy the earlier models, even though
they had Linux preinstalled, because there was a good chance that the
nonfree drivers might not survive significant kernel upgrades.

-- hendrik