Debian Conference 2015 The annual Debian developer meeting

We've been shying away from including non-free firmware packages in Debian for a long time for the obvious DFSG/SC reasons. But arguably we're also not solving the problems a lot of our users face. Official installation and live media is often not useful to many people today because of this: imagine installing a laptop with only wireless connectivity, and the wireless needs non-free firmware to function.

More and more people seem to be using the "unofficial" installation and live media now. Others are having to add "non-free" to their sources.list after installation. What could / should we do about this?

A number of people have suggested adding a new (sub)component to the archive ("non-free-firmware", "non-free/firmware" or similar), such that we could treat this slightly differently to the rest of the stuff in non-free. This will hopefully help people by allowing users to choose only this limited set of non-free stuff for their system, but nothing more.

Should we consider adding this new section to our installation media? I don't think there are any easy answers here - please join in the discussion...

Speaker