I line-up with Debian's principled stand against non-free blobs.
Having said that, my reason for preferring firmware freedom mainly isn't principle; it's that non-free firmware potentially deprives me of control of my own equipment. By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer equipment that doesn't depend on blobbiness.
I realise that these incentives are strictly at the margin; but Debian is the only leading distro that takes a hard line on these matters. If Debian were to retire from the battlefield, nobody would be left standing except the closed-firmware hardware makers. That would make me sad.
The problem is that freedom respecting hardware pretty much doesn't exist if you are buying the latest generation of hardware from popular vendors. Even if you are willing to go outside of x86, even the latest generation of OpenPOWER requires blobs.
> By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer equipment that doesn't depend on blobbiness.
Actually, it only incentives people to buy and manufacturers to offer equipment which has the exact same blobs on a NAND chip on the equipment itself. It's more convenient, sure, since there's no need to find a copy of (the correct version of) the blob and load it together with the driver, but it still depends on these blobs.
Having said that, my reason for preferring firmware freedom mainly isn't principle; it's that non-free firmware potentially deprives me of control of my own equipment. By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer equipment that doesn't depend on blobbiness.
I realise that these incentives are strictly at the margin; but Debian is the only leading distro that takes a hard line on these matters. If Debian were to retire from the battlefield, nobody would be left standing except the closed-firmware hardware makers. That would make me sad.