A goal of Debian (and some other distros) is to have a system that is 100% freely and legally modifiable by the user. What you're saying is not the only altern

A goal of Debian (and some other distros) is to have a system that is 100% freely and legally modifiable by the user. What you're saying is not the only alternative, really what everyone would prefer is if the firmware was just made open source. It's very disappointing that hardware vendors have various reasons they can't do this for older hardware that they don't even manufacture anymore or derive any profit from at all.