[Mageia-dev] Non-free firmwares in installer

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Fri Mar 25 17:34:15 CET 2011


My two cents as an user:

> Presumably, FLOSS supporters are satisfied with the state of the current 
> ISOs, and https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523 would address 
> extending install functionality without changing the content of the 
> existing ISOs, which should be an improvement over where we are now 
> without corrupting the FLOSS purity of the existing ISOs.

Not all "FLOSS supporters" believe that ISOs should be "pure".
I would label myself a FLOSS partisan (having contributed in FLOSS
projects for 10 years), and yet I don't really make a fuss if an
ISO contains non-free software, especially if such software is
necessary for good use of some peripherals...

By labelling "FLOSS supporters" only the partisans of aforementioned
"purity" (a term which, in any political context, should really give you
shivers), you are making the community as a whole a disservice. It is
not "the purists" vs. "the realists", or some other caricatural
reduction of reality.

> You can say what you like about newbies or "Aunt Edna", but anyone who 
> can find one ISO for themselves can find two, and the argument about how 
> the drivers/firmware wouldn't take up much space on the DVD goes both 
> ways, since downloading a separate ISO for them is then not that big a 
> deal in terms of bandwidth.

Having one ISOs instead of several is not about minimizing download
times, it's about providing a better user experience.

OTOH, if aforementioned non-free software can be downloaded
automatically over the Internet (especially during installation), then
the whole issue becomes moot.

</my 2 cents>

Regards

Antoine.




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