I think you somehow maneuvered yourself into a illogical position without realizing it?
Including some optional firmwares in the install boot-medium infringes zero rights of yours and none of the 4 software freedoms are impacted by this.
Complain with the hardware vendors for making these firmwares a requirement if you will, but better not buy such hardware in the first place. But Debian absolutely did the right thing here to their current and future users by optionally including these non-free firmwares regardless of what some ideological demagogues say.
The majority of the hardware either requires it, or it doesn’t. It is the rare edge case that it can also work in a degraded mode using only Free software, and you are free to not use such firmwares on your system after installing Debian on it. But yes in the 30 minutes or so that you use the installer it will be auto-loaded helping a lot of users actually install an running system and inflicting no damage to you at all.
I disagree that it removes any Freedom from you, but even if that were the case the damage would be so minuscule compared to the massive improvement for others that literally could not even install Debian on their system before.
And sure, there might be possible complicated work-arounds, but this issue has existed for years and no one bothered to implement them. So finally the silent majority took the right step to make this minimal impact change, and now the ball is really back with those complaining about this change. I am sure Debian will not be opposed to include some sort of selection in the boot process if someone would actually implement it, but that is far from trivial to do.
I think you somehow maneuvered yourself into a illogical position without realizing it?
Including some optional firmwares in the install boot-medium infringes zero rights of yours and none of the 4 software freedoms are impacted by this.
Complain with the hardware vendors for making these firmwares a requirement if you will, but better not buy such hardware in the first place. But Debian absolutely did the right thing here to their current and future users by optionally including these non-free firmwares regardless of what some ideological demagogues say.
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I didn’t mean you personally with that, sorry if that was not clear.
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Only if you run hardware that requires it. That is not the fault of Debian and making this hardware available for use is better than not doing it.
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The majority of the hardware either requires it, or it doesn’t. It is the rare edge case that it can also work in a degraded mode using only Free software, and you are free to not use such firmwares on your system after installing Debian on it. But yes in the 30 minutes or so that you use the installer it will be auto-loaded helping a lot of users actually install an running system and inflicting no damage to you at all.
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I disagree that it removes any Freedom from you, but even if that were the case the damage would be so minuscule compared to the massive improvement for others that literally could not even install Debian on their system before.
And sure, there might be possible complicated work-arounds, but this issue has existed for years and no one bothered to implement them. So finally the silent majority took the right step to make this minimal impact change, and now the ball is really back with those complaining about this change. I am sure Debian will not be opposed to include some sort of selection in the boot process if someone would actually implement it, but that is far from trivial to do.