On Fri, Jun 05, 2015 at 01:13:51AM +0100, KatolaZ wrote:
> Maybe I am the only one unable to see the problem in asking the owner
> of hardware which requires some essential non-free firmware during
> installation to put the required firmware on a USB stick during the
> first boot. If the user has got a way to burn a net-install cd, then
> he almost surely has no problem into plugging a USB stick on that
> other computer and copying one file therein....

Because maybe the user doesn't have a free USB stick available?

No, I'm not coming up with theoretical problems:
When I was taking courses at the university, there was a smallish LUG
there, with its own club room, a few desktops, and a table.
Standard practice for installing distros was bring your laptop, and there
was a single shared flash drive that stayed in the room as installation
media: to install a distro, someone downloads a hybrid ISO, dd's it
to the flash drive, and then you boot from it.
There was no second flash drive for installing, and frequently no one
brought their own flash drive: almost everyone had a login on the
university servers, where they could store almost anything, and
course work was available via an online portal.

In short, there was usually only the flash drive that the CD was written to.

> From a legal point of view, I would also carefully refrain from
> redistributing any non-free firmware in Devuan, the main reason being
> that usually you *don't* have the right to redistribute it, and even
> if you have got this right from the HW constructor, such right can be
> withdrawn any moment at their own will, which might be a quite
> unpleasent surprise for Devuan...

There is a *very* large set of non-free firmware for which at least your
first claim is false, and for much of it the second is false as well.
I've actually read several of the licenses in firmware-linux-nonfree.

b43 is/was a notable exception, getting it the "b43-fwcutter" package...
which leads me to mention something else:
The criteria for something getting into debian non-free require your
claims to be false for that package, if it isn't a downloader or
installer.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham