The results of the general vote (GR, general resolution) of the Debian project developers involved in maintaining packages and maintaining the infrastructure have been published, which considered the issue of supplying proprietary firmware as part of official installation images and live builds. The vote was won by the fifth item "Change the Social Contract for the supply of non-free firmware in the installer with the provision of uniform installation assemblies."
The chosen option implies a change in the Social Contract (Debian Social Contract), which defines the fundamental principles of the project and the obligations of the project by the community. A note will be added to the fifth clause of the social contract, which contains the requirement to adhere to free software standards, that official Debian media may include firmware that is not part of the Debian system, if necessary to ensure that the distribution runs on hardware that requires such firmware to run. .
The official Debian installation media and live images will include packages from the "non-free-firmware" section, which contains components related to firmware from the non-free repository. If you have hardware that requires external firmware, the use of the required proprietary firmware will be enabled by default. At the same time, for users who prefer only free software, at the download stage it will be possible to disable the use of non-free firmware.
In addition, the installer and live image will provide information about what type of firmware is loaded. The information about the firmware used will also be saved to the installed system so that the user can retrieve the information about the firmware used at a later time. If firmware is required for the operation of the equipment after installation, the system also suggests adding 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. Images with proprietary firmware will be shipped as official media that will replace previously offered images without non-free firmware.
The issue with the supply of firmware has become relevant as equipment manufacturers increasingly resort 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 was also handled by the Debian project, which required 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.
Source: opennet.ru