If some people want a Debian-like OS with binary drivers and other non-free stuff, you can always create your own distribution or join one of the many other distros that exist.

Please don’t argue about including non-free stuff in Debian, because it’s not going to happen, and shouldn’t happen. Debian exists to be purely free.

I use the nvidia drivers. I compile them from the provided source and I even (heavens no) force compiled them to run on Xen. Nothing would have stopped me from modifying and sharing the mod if necessary.

As long as you don’t try to modify the binary portions of the drivers, that may be true. The moment you try to modify the binary portion of the Nvidia driver, perhaps to fix a bug that crashes your machine and perhaps causes disk corruption (such bugs have existed before) you are not allowed to redistribute the modified component, per the Nvidia Software License. Heck, if you find out there is a wild pointer bug in the binary portion of the driver, you are not permitted per the Nvidia Software License to even debug the problem, since that would almost certainly fall into the reverse engineering prohibitions. (”Customer may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE.”)

That’s why I recommend people NOT use the Nvidia drivers. It has been buggy in the past, and if it’s buggy in the binary drivers — no one but Nvidia can legally help you. So in that way, it’s precisely like Ford not allowing anyone other than the dealership fix your car.

I’m less worried about (for example) the proprietary firmware/software in my television, ipod, laser printer, or the engine controller in my car, because they are devices with their own fixed abstractions. If it doesn’t work, I can file a warranty claim; it’s not like a bug in the firmware inside my HP Laserjet 2200 can someone reach across the parallel cable or ethernet cable and cause my system to crash. Hence, I don’t care very much about having source access to the firmware inside my HP LaserJet 2200. I do care very much about having source access to the video driver that is inside my Linux kernel, since if it has bugs, it *can* screw up my kernel. And fortunately, there are many alternatives to Nvidia available on the market which do make available the source code for their kernel drivers for their video cards.

What gives?

I wasn’t talking about feasibility of changing a Toyota. I was talking about asking permission.

You bring up two straw men. It’s silly to say that you can’t modify a car to the point it is no longer street legal. You can’t modify gnometris to the point it intentionally steals passwords either. And whether a car is less efficient because it is hackable, that’s a purely historical issue.

Also the mods I mentioned are entirely routine non-street-legal-disqualifying. There are routine modifications in source code which will begin to push against the copyright, patent, and trademark barrier, perhaps not eliminiating them but making them a bit more rational.

The inventiveness and self-motivation in this age is almost nil. I would think we would be encouraging a change in that trend.

I use what works. Everything I put out, save for le job, is GPL’d. If I have the source code for a permission crippled product I will hack it and distribute the hack. I’ll call my lawyer before distributing the source code (depending on how it was acquired).

That being said, sometimes people are willing to buy a big car that guzzles more gasoline because it’s easier to service and hack the car. There’s nothing like a big old-fashioned American gas-guzzler with so much space in the engine compartment so you can stand inside it while working on the carburetor. But you do trade off various things, like being able to park in tiny spaces especially in the city, and terrible gas mileage.

In other products, the tradeoffs may not exist, or they may not matter a lot. I really don’t care about 1200 frames per second playing Doom; heck, I don’t play Doom at all — so I’ll take the video card with open source drivers with decent (but not great) 3D performance over the ones with top-notch 3D performance, but with crappy proprietary drivers that have a rich and storied history of wild pointer bugs that corrupt the kernel causing strange and wondrous crashes in unrelated portiosn of the Linux kernel.

But in terms of closed-source firmware, as long as a component, such as a wireless card, or an ethernet controller, or a SCSI controller, does what they are spec’ed to do, I really don’t care whether or not I can personally hack the firmware of a wireless card or an ethernet controller. Just as I don’t require that nuts and bolts to be hackable, or expect that I be able to modify the internals of a 7400 TTL NAND chip, I consider various computer peripherals as things which are not interesting for me to hack. So at least for me, firmware is fundamentally different than requiring open source drivers which runs in the Linux kernel address space. Similarly, since I’m not interested in being able to hack my internal combustion engine, a new-fangled engine with fuel injection controlled by a closed-source firmware which if tampered with, would very likely make them far worse in terms of polluting the atmosphere. A 1950’s era car surrounded with two tons of heavy iron is much easier to hack, and was never designed with pollution control in mind, so messing with it isn’t a problem. But that’s not a car which interests me at all, although I know at least one or two people who would prefer that.

Software is a commodity. Vendor and consumer are blurring into one.

Provide the free parts on the disc. Allow people to download an addon set of drivers. In fact my laptop came that way. Winders on one CD, HP drivers on another.