Who needs non-free firmware anyway ?

So Nietszche had a change that I knew I would get some comment on. The switch to the linux-libre kernel which in turn would mean that non-free firmware no longer works. About 99% of the real impact of this would be exclusively on wireless cards. Sure some motherboard extensions would lose features but these are power-user features anyway and wouldn’t really be noticed by desktop users. Very few other drivers have this problem, and again, most of them are not really noticeable by end-users in the first place.

But what about the wifi cards ? Right now the list of supported cards if you use a free distro is really not huge, though it’s interesting to see it’s growth compared to just a short period ago. This growth can be largely credited to the free distros’ refusal to include their non-free firmware, and since a large part of the market for wifi is embedded Linux* devices (like ADSL routers) having linux support without issues is a big market opportunity, this is one set of hardware manufacturers for whom Linux support is crucial.
It’s not so much an issue for the card manufacturers – from their point of view, we’re still a tiny minority, but the chipset makers sat up and took notice. Hence the sudden support by companies like Atheros and Broadcom over the past year or so with GPL’d firmware and drivers appearing.

But what about those users who have cards that worked with non-free firmware ? Cards that would have worked with Sophocles but won’t work with Nietszche ? I was concerned about it – but I couldn’t back down from the philosophical issues at stake so I prepared myself for a lot of patient explaining and perhaps losing some users.

What a pleasant surprise I had. Only a few users actually posted bug reports about this, which by itself is an indication that much of our userbase has been using free-software friendly devices in the first place, but the nice thing was the ones who didn’t.

In each case, I would calmly and without malice explain why this card doesn’t work. I would indicate why it’s important to support those manufacturers who work with us, rather than selling out our freedom to those who don’t (and thus removing their motivation to ever provide free drivers). I would then state that while the user has the option to replace the kernel with a non-free one, and I couldn’t stop them from doing that any more than any other piece of non-free software. I would say that it wouldn’t even be that hard since our linux-libre kernel configuration works with the non-free kernel as well so there is no need to configure it.

Then I would say – but it would really be better to rather buy a wifi card or usb wifi that can work with free software.
Virtually every single one of them responded: “I think I’ll rather buy a new wifi card – can you make a recomendation ?”
I would then link them to the above list, and mention that I had, personally, had very good results with Atheros cards.

This is the big thing – most distro’s have been to scared to stick to their guns on this issue, even Debian was – yet it seems that from Kongoni’s experience here, there is no issue – the users once they understood the issue, almost without exception, decided that the low cost associated with wifi device these days was a small price to pay to support freedom, that this freedom was worth more to them than a bit of convenience and a little bit of cash.

Now it is perhaps also true that my sample is skewed, most of our users came expecting a fully free system so they may include more people who are more open to the idea in the first place than say, Debian’s user base. Furthermore, our userbase compared to Debian’s is still very small, so our sample-size is not very big either.
If Debian or Ubuntu does the same, likely – there would be quite a lot of users who would complain. Especially from the open-source crowd who don’t care about freedom in the first place. This may have an even bigger impact on Ubuntu than Debian. Ubuntu is often a first-timers distro, it’s harder to explain this to a first-time user without making him feel it’s just not worth it (perhaps), but Debian, like Kongoni is mostly used by people who have more experience, that would suggest people not very likely to go back to windows.

I’m confident on this one, people may have trouble switching, but I have hardly ever heard of somebody who having switched wouldn’t need to be dragged kicking and screaming back to windows.

Our users would really rather buy another wifi card than to not run their preferred distribution of their preferred operating system. So my challenge to Debian is to be true to their own ethos, strip out the non-free firmware entirely. Sure some people will complain, probably more than in our case but they are not that many, and I promise you most of them will in the end rather spend a little money on a supported wifi card than to lose out on Debian. Your user loyalty is legendary, if our users would do it for Kongoni, there is no way yours won’t do it for you.

*In this case I am referring specifically to the kernel, not the whole OS – hence I used the word Linux, not GNU/Linux.