Steve Lamb wrote: > Digby Tarvin wrote: > > Consequently I think Debian's more restrictive policy on hardware support > > during and after installation is a disadvantage. By all means give > > preference > > to free and open software where there are alternatives, but the time to > > worry > > about the open source friendlyness of the hardware is when making the > > original > > purchase, not during the install. > > I agree. I'm all for openness and freedom, don't get me wrong. But I > hardly see how openness and freedom that forces people into a certain position > is either open or free. It's just another close position. If it is our > machine then where's the fault in us doing what we want with it? Especially > in cases where a free and open alternative often doesn't exist.
You know, there's nothing stopping anyone who wants Debian to support
installing to hardware that needs a non-free driver from adding that
support. For example, the NSLU2 is a sub-$100 network attached storage
device that can run Debian. It's one of the cheapest and best ways to
add an ARM architecture machine to your network and makes an excellent
tiny and silent Debian server.
Its ethernet controller needs the extremely non-free ixp400 driver which
has a license that only allows it to be distributed after showing a
click-through license to the user. This prevents including the driver in
Debian (main or non-free) (or in Ubuntu AFAIK); it would be really
annoying if installing Debian meant clicking through dozens of licenses
like this.
However, the NSLU2 is already well-supported by Debian, and will soon be
excellently supported; you can click through the license and download an
installation image including the problimatic driver from
www.slug-firmware.net, the installer will soon take care of copying that
driver onto the system it installs and automatically loading it. The
installer's documentation points users who need an image with the
ethernet driver to www.slug-firmware.net (those who have a USB NIC can
instead use it with images distributed directly by Debian), and there
are support packages in Debian that provide hooks for using the driver.
This solution is entirely consistent with Debian's principles of
freedom, while also being extremely pragmatic. IMHO it will also help lead
to a free version of the ixp400 driver eventually, by expanding the
community of freedom-concious NSLU2 users.
This is actually an extreme case, since most non-free drivers are not
quite as obnoxiously non-free as the ixp400 driver; many of them are
included in Debian non-free. Some, like the ndiswrapper, are even in
Debian proper. It should be even easier to integrate such drivers into
the installer. For example all that needs doing for ndiswrapper is:
1) Someone doing the work to keep ndiswrapper kernel modules in Debian
up-to-date with the current version of the kernel in Debian, which is
not currently being done.
2) Someone writing the necessary code to let the installer prompt or a
windows driver CD, pull the windows drivers off it and feed them to
ndiswrapper.
(I'll tell you what: someone take care of #1, and I'll do #2.)
This solution would again be completly consistent with Debian's
principles while also as pragmatic a solution as is possible. There are
other approaches possible for other sorts of non-free drivers, but in
all cases the limiting factor is someone to do the work to integrate it
into Debian.
--
see shy jo, with his debian-installer team hat on, sending this message
via a NSLU2 that acts as his dialup internet gateway and
squid cache, and that's running the non-free ixp400 driver
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