Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/843172/rss

It is an unfortunate fact of life that non-free firmware blobs are required
to use some hardware, such as network devices (WiFi in particular), audio
peripherals, and video cards. Beyond that, those blobs may even be
required in order to install a Linux distribution, so an installation over
the network may need to get non-free firmware directly from the installation
media. That, as might be guessed, is a bit of a problem for distributions
that are not willing to officially ship said firmware because of its
non-free status, as a recent discussion in the Debian community shows.