Hello,

I am a very long time Debian system admin its obvious why I am here at the Devuan junction so I will spare a longer introduction to this mailing list(its my first post).

I remember coming across this topic on a previous post but did not get a clear end goal answer. there is a old relevant argument which is more free GPL or BSD I believe the answer is simple, BSD provides more individual freedom and GPL freedom as a society which forces others to respect freedom(both are free), kinda like only the king in society is truely free for society at large to be free we I'll loose a certain freedom, which is to impose nonfree rules upon others. That little tidbit of philosophy is a little outside my point but good food for thought.

I would like to lobby this project into offering a Libre installation medium.

Debian even though not endorsed by the FSF as truly libre has done a great job at separating free and nonfree it has also made its installation medium binary blob free with the option of adding them during installation or afterwards. I liked this approach since I would prefer to have packages in my system that I can reproduce exact binaries by compiling them myself and test those builds and for everything in my system to be freedom respecting if possible, but still have the option to make computers or hardware work that require these silly blobs. My guess would be Devuan will be taking this same approach since its parent is already this way but there were some other posts in this mailing list that made it sound otherwise cause its about freedom of choice.

I would like to add that because of more enforced free licenses like the GPL as opposed to the BSD are good reasons that the community and opensource has flourished as a whole IMO and this principle of a libre starting point with the option of adding blobs and nonfree repos is a fundamental building block that allows for the most ideal starting point. I know its not a direct correlation comparing the BSD and GPL (since both are free) to the devuan installation medium but my point is that it would be nice if devuan made it easy to do the freedom respecting thing from beginning with options for fully individual freedom of nonfree upon install.

so to start with a completely free system with the option to use nonfree as a individual freedom like Debian is something I hope devuan will continue.


Thanks.