The Debian project has started a general vote on the supply of proprietary firmware

The Debian project has announced a general resolution (GR) vote by the project developers on the issue of supplying proprietary firmware as part of official installation images and live builds. The discussion phase of the points put up for voting will last until September 2, after which the collection of votes will begin. There are about XNUMX developers involved in maintaining packages and maintaining the Debian infrastructure that have voting rights.

Recently, hardware manufacturers have increasingly resorted to using external firmware loaded by the operating system, instead of supplying firmware in permanent memory on the devices themselves. Such external firmware is required by many modern graphics, sound and network adapters. At the same time, the question of how the supply of proprietary firmware correlates with the requirement to ship only free software in the main Debian builds is ambiguous, since firmware is run on hardware devices, not in the system, and refers to hardware. Modern computers, equipped with even completely free distributions, run firmware built into the hardware. The only difference is that some firmware is loaded by the operating system, while others are already flashed into ROM or Flash memory.

Until now, proprietary firmware has not been included in the official Debian install images and has been shipped in a separate non-free repository. Installation builds with proprietary firmware have the status of unofficial and are distributed separately, which leads to confusion and creates difficulties for users, since in many cases the full operation of modern equipment can only be achieved after installing proprietary firmware. The preparation and maintenance of unofficial builds with proprietary firmware is handled by the Debian project, which requires additional expenditure of resources for building, testing and hosting unofficial builds that duplicate the official ones.

A situation has arisen in which unofficial builds are more preferable for the user if he wants to achieve normal support for his equipment, and installing the recommended official builds often leads to problems in hardware support. In addition, the use of unofficial builds interferes with the ideal of supplying only open source software and unwittingly leads to the popularization of proprietary software, since the user, along with the firmware, also receives a connected non-free repository with other non-free software.

To solve the problem of activating the non-free repository for users in the case of using non-free firmware, it is proposed to separate proprietary firmware from the non-free repository into a separate non-free-firmware component and ship it separately without requiring activation of the non-free repository. As for the supply of proprietary firmware in installation assemblies, three options for changes are put up for voting:

Include non-free firmware packages in the official installation media. A new install image including non-free firmware will be shipped instead of an image containing only free software. If you have hardware that requires external firmware, the use of the required proprietary firmware will be enabled by default. At the same time, at the boot stage, a setting will be added that allows you to completely disable the use of non-free firmware. In order for the user to make an informed choice, the installer will explicitly separate free and non-free firmware, as well as display information about what type of firmware will be loaded. After installation in the system, it is proposed to add a non-free-firmware repository to the sources.list file by default, which will allow you to receive firmware updates with fixes for vulnerabilities and important errors.

Prepare an installation image with non-free firmware as described in point 1, but ship it separately and not instead of an image containing only free software. It is proposed to make the new installation image official with non-free firmware, but continue shipping the old version of the official image that does not include proprietary firmware. To make it easier for beginners to discover, the image with the firmware will be displayed in a more prominent place. An image without firmware will also be offered on the same page with downloads, but as a lower priority.

Allow the Debian project to create a separate install image that includes packages from the non-free section, which will be available for download in addition to the install image containing only free software. The download will be organized in such a way that the user is informed before the download begins which of the images contains only free software.

Source: opennet.ru