veyepar: Firmware - a hard or soft problem?

Author(s):	Steve McIntyre
Location	Helsinki
Date	aug Mon 17	Days Raw Files
Start	14:00	First Raw Start	error-in-template
Duration	00:45:00	Offset	None
End	14:45	Last Raw End
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https://summit.debconf.org/debconf15/meeting/332/firmware-a-hard-or-soft-problem/
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assets release.pdf Firmware_a_hard_or_soft_problem.json
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We've been shying away from including non-free firmware packages in
Debian for a long time for the obvious DFSG/SC reasons. But arguably
we're also not solving the problems a lot of our users face. Official
installation and live media is often not useful to many people today
because of this: imagine installing a laptop with only wireless
connectivity, and the wireless needs non-free firmware to
function.

More and more people seem to be using the "unofficial" installation
and live media now. Others are having to add "non-free" to their
sources.list after installation. What could / should we do about this?

A number of people have suggested adding a new (sub)component to the
archive ("non-free-firmware", "non-free/firmware" or similar), such
that we could treat this slightly differently to the rest of the stuff
in non-free. This will hopefully help people by allowing users to
choose only this limited set of non-free stuff for their system, but
nothing more.

Should we consider adding this new section to our installation media?
I don't think there are any easy answers here - please join in the
discussion...

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