> Why does anyone really care about non-free firmware blobs? I'll have a stab at this. I suspect it's an argument about simplicity. Debian has drawn a very s

> Why does anyone really care about non-free firmware blobs? I'll have a stab at this. I suspect it's an argument about simplicity. Debian has drawn a very simple and clear line in the sand: everything in its main archive is truly open source. Simple lines are easy to reason about, easy to defend and easy to explain. Bright simple lines are a wonderful defence against slippery slopes and weaselly pragmatic arguments for weakening them. They should not be given up likely. It didn't help that the original posts in this Debian discussion boiled down to making all non-free software easily available on install media. In other words initially, it wasn't just non-free firmware blobs, it was all non-free software being allowed to cross that line in the sand. Doing that would almost be an admission Debian's core moral compass wasn't workable in the real world. That would be dismal if it was true (for me at least). Happily it's not true, as it turns out it's only the binary firmware blobs that are indispensable for the install. It took a while for that to be uncovered and acknowledged in the thread. Once that was recognised the point you make here, that firmware blobs are a special case, was made even more strongly in the Debian thread and repeated in the LWN article. Extending the point you make here, I reckon Debian could draw a pretty bright line around firmware blobs that kept them firmly separated from other non-free software. If most DD's were convinced that line will hold, I'd say there is a reasonable chance they'd allow such blobs alongside the true open source software on their install media. But that is a long road to hoe. It would involve expanding the current 3 categories of software, "free, contrib and non-free" to four - perhaps with the addition of "foreign". The political battles it would involve aside, they are hardwired into god knows how many places. non-free firmware blobs creating that amount of work is itself a good reason to care about them.