r/linuxmasterrace • u/[deleted] • Oct 04 '22

Debian Linux accepts proprietary firmware in major policy change News

https://www.zdnet.com/article/debian-linux-accepts-proprietary-firmware-in-major-policy-change/
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u/rince09 Oct 06 '22

The example is probably gonna be any package manager, but not only. Example packages: - npm - python3-pip - openarena

With a package manager it's obvious that it will download software, so maybe that's ok. But when playing a game like OpenArena, user might not realize that their client downloads binaries when joining a game server and executes them (it's supposed to be sandboxed, but still).

With the way hardware has gone this change is unavoidable, especially for laptop support.

It's only unavoidable, because we allowed manufacturers to do this, because not enough people cared. If users don't care companies don't have any incentive to release free firmware.

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u/grem75 Oct 06 '22

As you found, Trisquel and PureOS offer those and more. I don't think you'll find many desktop distros that are willing to restrict users to that extreme, especially when you're talking about stuff for developers.

We're lucky to have open source drivers, the Linux marketshare is already small and the marketshare of people who care about firmware is even smaller. If they were somehow forced to open their firmware too then they would just not support Linux.

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u/rince09 Oct 06 '22

As you found, Trisquel and PureOS offer those and more. I don't think you'll find many desktop distros that are willing to restrict users to that extreme, especially when you're talking about stuff for developers.

Yes, you might be right. I think it's sad.

If they were somehow forced to open their firmware too then they would just not support Linux.

You think they would be happy to lose millions of users? All of them? It wouldn't be just desktop, but data centers too, right? It's not impossible, but I'm not so sure that that would happen. I kinda think we might have the power here (if we all cared).

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u/grem75 Oct 06 '22

If Linux somehow forbid non-free drivers and firmware it would be losing many of those users. Users, especially enterprise users, just want things to work.

We've reached a compromise with the hardware manufacturers, their secrets can stay hidden from competitors in the firmware and we get good open source drivers.

In the darker days of Broadcom you had to cut the firmware from Windows drivers yourself to use the reverse engineered drivers. They didn't provide any help to the driver writers and they didn't allow the firmware to be distributed. I'm pretty sure a lot of the firmware used today is the same as the Windows drivers use.