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By Jake Edge
January 20, 2021
It is an unfortunate fact of life that non-free firmware blobs are required to use some hardware, such as network devices (WiFi in particular), audio peripherals, and video cards. Beyond that, those blobs may even be required in order to install a Linux distribution, so an installation over the network may need to get non-free firmware directly from the installation media. That, as might be guessed, is a bit of a problem for distributions that are not willing to officially ship said firmware because of its non-free status, as a recent discussion in the Debian community shows.
Surely Dan Pal did not expect the torrent of responses he received to his short note to the debian-devel mailing list about problems he encountered trying to install Debian. He wanted to install the distribution on a laptop that was running Windows 10, but could not use the normal network installation mechanism because the WiFi device required non-free firmware. He tracked down the DVD version of the distribution and installed that, but worried that Debian is shooting itself in the foot by not prominently offering more installation options: "The current policy of hiding other versions of Debian is limiting the adoption of your OS by people like me who are interested in moving from Windows 10."
The front page at debian.org currently has a prominent "Download" button that starts to retrieve a network install ("netinst") CD image when clicked. But that image will not be terribly useful for systems that need non-free firmware to make the network adapter work. Worse yet, it is "impossible to find" a working netinst image with non-free firmware, Sven Joachim said, though he was overstating things a bit. Alexis Murzeau suggested adding a link under the big download button that would lead users to alternate images containing non-free firmware. He also pointed out that there are two open bugs (one from 2010 and another from 2016) that are related, so the problem is hardly a new one.
While they are hard to find, there are unofficial images with non-free firmware for Debian, as Holger Levsen noted; he also pointed to his 2017 blog post that he uses to rediscover those images when he needs them. It is a rather strange situation; Emanuele Rocca put it this way:
So the current situation is that we make an active effort to produce two different types of installation media: one that works for all users, and one broken for most laptops. Some sort of FOSS version of an anti-feature. Then we publish the broken version on the front page, and hide very carefully the version that works.
This absurdly damages our users without improving the state of Free Software in any way, while Ubuntu puts the firmware back into the images and can rightly claim to be easier to install.
But Jeremy Stanley took exception to that characterization:
The one you say "works for all users" doesn't "work" for me because it contains proprietary closed-source software I don't want. This boils down to a debate over whether the Debian community values convenience over ideals. It can be argued that for users who value convenience more, Ubuntu already exists. Why compete with that and compromise Debian's ideals at the same time?
That is, of course, the crux of the matter. Debian has a set of ideals about the kinds of software it distributes, enshrined in the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG); non-free licenses do not fit within those ideals. In addition, the Debian Social Contract (which contains the DFSG) specifically notes that "non-free works are not a part of Debian". But the problem at hand is that potential users may not even be able to install Debian (or use it once installed) if they cannot access the network; it is hard for some to see how that advances the cause of free software, which is also a part of the contract.
In response to Stanley, Russ Allbery pointed out that there is a middle ground. No one had suggested removing the official images that do not have the non-free firmware, but there are some interested in making it easier to find the images needed for much of today's hardware.
The point is to make things easier for our users. Right now, we're doing that for you but not for the users who don't care whether firmware is non-free. I think the idea is that we should consider making things easier for both groups of users. There's no reason to make things worse for you and others who want the fully free installer in the process.
The official installer does offer the option of installing non-free firmware from a USB drive, "but very few people use it", Andrew M.A. Carter said. Allbery described the process he goes through to try to use that mechanism; it is far from straightforward even for someone quite familiar with Debian:
I have always managed to get it to work, but usually it's an hour of cursing and Googling things and making different USB sticks in different formats with different file systems and retrying parts of the installation until I hit on the magic combination of factors to make it work.
One can only imagine that new users who encounter this wall are unlikely to continue to down the Debian path. Allbery said that an installer with non-free firmware would work much better for him, but he wasn't able to find the specific one he needed (for the "testing" version of the distribution). Andrey Rahmatullin said that the inability to find these images is caused by a "failing of the Debian websites"; there should be an easier path to find the alternate installation images. Russell Stuart said that he always runs into the same problem that Allbery reported and that, even though Stuart is a strong proponent of the separation of free and non-free in Debian, firmware is a different beast:
[...] these firmware blobs are peculiar. They don't run on the same CPU, we talk to them with strictly open API's and protocols. In that way, they aren't anything new. We already talk to and depend on megabytes of nonfree software to get our laptop's booted, but we tolerate it because it lives in ROM. We don't consider firmware in ROM to be part of Debian even though it must be running for our Debian machines to run.
After Paul Wise pointed out that there actually are unofficial images with non-free firmware for the testing distribution, Holger Wansing suggested some changes (and as a patch) for the web site to make it easier for users to find these images when needed. As Marc Haber said, though, the installation experience is likely the first impression a potential new user will get; "we should not be trying THIS hard to be a failure in this very important part of the relationship our product is building with the user". But pointing users at the unofficial images is different from Debian officially distributing this non-free firmware, as Steve McIntyre pointed out:
There's a major difference here - do we want Debian's *official* media to include non-free stuff? We've had this discussion a few times, including in person back at DC15 [DebConf 15] at least. Back then, the overwhelming response was *no*. We can change that, but it's not something to do lightly.
Haber feels strongly that being purists about firmware is only leading to fewer new users. Wise agreed in part: "the current situation wrt hardware and software freedom is pretty catastrophic". He suggested making things clearer for users and potential users, perhaps by way of an "installer launcher app". That app would analyze the needs of the existing hardware to help guide (and presumably educate) users in their installer choice.
While there were lots of ideas of how to make things better, this problem has existed for a long time in Debian. Marco d'Itri said that he had raised the issue back in 2004, but it likely goes much further back than that. Ansgar Burchardt said that in 2016 he had proposed creating a new section in the repository to hold the non-free firmware (separate from the rest of the non-free software), which might be a preliminary step. But consensus was not reached and that effort died on the vine. As with the open bugs, these accounts show that the distribution has been struggling with this issue for quite some time.
At this point, it is not at all clear what will happen. The discussion may just fade away, only to be picked up again down the road. The problem is real and making the situation better, at least, does not seem all that difficult, nor particularly harmful to Debian's overall goals. But that has been true all along and here we are. It would seem that there has simply not been enough "push" to make progress, but with any luck, this time around things will be different.
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