On 06/03/2015 05:53 AM, James Powell wrote:
> If the firmware aids in compatibility and driver support then yes, include it.
>
*** I think non-free anything should not be "included" by default. For
the sake of "universality", they should be available to people who
actually need them. Many people will expect non-free drivers to be
readily available during installation, and they'd be "right" to do so.
Not because such hardware should be supported, but because most of the
time, users do not have control over the production of hardware (nor the
consumption: "good" hardware is less readily available than "bad" one.)

As Devuan offers a pretty easy and automated way to make a custom build,
maybe we should take advantage of this, and provide a way for
downloading non-free blobs during install, after the detection was made.
This way would at least make users aware of the problem.

Moreover, this would enable surveying what non-free software sneak in
our machines on a large scale and help fight this situation. If we just
tuck in non-free drivers in the default installer, we make it normal to
surrender our rights to hardware manufacturers. On the contrary, we
should expose them*.

Some people will not have this kind of ethical dilemma and will happily
burn a modified Devuan version with all the malware tucked in. And it's
good they do, because in some cases that means the machine will run at
all. But for the sake of Devuan, I wish we did not provide that product
ourselves for it should be the proprietary software and hardware
vendors-defectors who should provide for their own needs, and not the
cooperative community.

==
hk

*: it would be awesome if we could simply feed the h-node.org database
automatically to report working and failing components automatically.

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