Please place notes here for the firmware BoF

https://blog.einval.com/2022/04/19#firmware-what-do-we-do

The FSF position - and the ideal - all firmware and software to be free

Firmware has been a bit of a myth since about 1998 - the 3COM 3C509TP Ethernet card had firmware, burnt in MAC and DIP switches to set card addresses, the 3C900 was software set - but one's OK and one's not?

Sledge's proposal - my take (by amacater)

Firmware archive to be more clearly defined: free firmware to continue as-is, perhaps.
One non-free firmware archive - marked as non-free and with all the caveats that we can't fix it if it breaks, can't necessarily provide source, are absolutely dependent on others to provide it - 
but enabled by default and included in our Debian official images would mark reality. Other distributions already do this silently. 
For Fedora, for example, some of the non-free firmware we ship (produced by Broadcom fw-cutter) they don't and vice versa - it would be good to work with other distros to establish common viewpoints.

What about the fully free image with only free firmware?

There's still a place for our current image with no non-free included: it's ideal for virtualisation on KVM/qemu, Hyper-V, cloud-images, WSL - where the drivers are for idealised machines. 
At that point, you're sitting on non-free firmware on disks/laptops or whatever anyway - but it could be used as such just not as the default that we offer to all our users..

Ideals have to face reality

The FSF recently used Debian to produce a fully "free" machine using Power9 - https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/closing-in-on-fully-free-bioses-with-the-fsf-tech-team - and then asked Trisquel to reimplement it. 
I'm not sure we can afford to be that idealistic any longer when, pragmatically, users can't install Debian on their servers or laptops and jump to something "easier". Our priorities remain our users and free software.

WiFi - the real bug

WiFi is always a problem. It doesn't help that there are various drivers that have been reverse engineered for common cheaper dongles but which only exist in scattered GitHub repositories. Trying to teach a novice user how to retrieve them, build with DKMS etc. doesn't fly - "but it works with Ubuntu" As above, can we work with others - could we even build DKMS for these drivers which are out of tree and distribute them?

Fully free hardware

We'd need someone senior at each of Intel/AMD/Qualcomm etc. to care enough - there isn't the use case for them to justify it. Dear Mark - can you persuade Lenovo :)

fwupd (Myon)

I believe the question if we install fwupd by default is connected to the question if people want non-free-firmware from the installer, so possibly the answer to that question should make d-i install fwupd if it was "yes".