official response
I was not asking for an official response. I wanted to hear answers from debian officials. Implying their answers would be
more valid.
response from fellow members in this thread is the answer(s) you seek.
No. If you had answered debian does not bother about free software people and therefore they are getting no free software iso, that would have been an answer. If you had answered making a free software iso would have been difficult and expensive that would have been an answer. So far I have not gotten any arguments telling why debian does not provide free software isos? I got a valid hardware argument why debian provides a non free software iso.
My point of view is if a distribution claims it is favoring free software, then it should always provide a free software iso if no strong arguments suggest otherwise. If it is a small task for a distribution to provide a one time free software iso of their distribution they should make it even if they know no one is going to download it. Because a free software iso is a signal to the public telling everybody this distribution knows about the value of free software.
If during installation of debian 12 there had been a checked box saying install non free firmware repository with the
option to uncheck the repository I would not have started this post.
And then again debian introduces the firmware=never option. The reason why I can still use debian. Is the firmware=never option debian acknowledging the importance of free software?
Statistics: Posted by hthi — 2026-01-21 18:37