policy: link to steve's debian firmware article

hslick-master
Leah Rowe 2022-11-25 14:20:40 +00:00
parent f4cabc43e4
commit f28a4b380b
1 changed files with 12 additions and 2 deletions

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@ -296,7 +296,9 @@ The FSF maintains another set of criteria, dubbed Free System Distribution
Guidelines (GNU FSDG)]
The FSDG criteria is separate from RYF, but has similar problems. FSDG is
what the FSF-endorsed GNU+Linux distros comply with. Thoughts:
what the FSF-endorsed GNU+Linux distros comply with. Basically, it bans
all proprietary software, including device firmware. This may seem noble, but
it's extremely problematic in the context of firmware. Food for thought:
* Excluding firmware blobs in the linux kernel is *bad*. Proprietary firmware
is *also bad*. Including them is a wiser choice, if strong education is also
@ -333,7 +335,15 @@ system. They tell you how to do it, which means that they are helping people
to get *some* freedom *rather than none*. This is an inherently pragmatic
way to do things, and it's now how Libreboot does it.
OpenBSD is very much the same, but they go a step further: during the initial
More context regarding Debian is available in this blog post:
<https://blog.einval.com/2022/04/19#firmware-what-do-we-do> - in it, the
author, a prominent Debian developer, makes excellent points about device
firmware similar to the (Libreboot) article that you're reading now. It's
worth a read! As of October 2022, Debian has voted to include device firmware
by *default*, in following Debian releases. It used to be that Debian excluded
such firmware, but allowed you to add it.
OpenBSD is very much the same, but they're clever about it: during the initial
boot, after installation, it tells you exactly what firmware is needed and
updates that for you. It's handled in a very transparent way, by
their `fw_update` program which you can read about here: