I don't think Linux is "Open Core"

> Why would I want to do that instead of installing a stock distribution kernel from, say, Debian, which already comes with most of the stuff I need to get my hardware running, and makes it convenient to install the rest?

Precisely because this convenience will play against you and the community when the time comes to recommend a computer for someone else to buy, or even at your next purchase.

If you make it easy and convenient for yourself to remain captured, odds are you won't fight as hard to release yourself.

If you go through a painful experience, and you understand that the pain is inflicted by the hardware vendor rather than by the operating system community, you will work hard to avoid that pain next time.

It's a way of using your own emotional feedback for long-term personal and social advantage.

Debian is not a good example of a distro that includes non-free software. They have taken a fairly hard-line (but also somewhat pragmatic in terms of still getting a release out from time to time) on removing any non-free drivers. Blobs which are non-free but redistributable are still made available in the nonfree repository, so life is rather more convenient than I assume it is with linux-libre, (add the repo and install linux-firmware-nonfree) but I hope it's clear to users that they had to install some non-free software to make their hardware work, which is the fundamental point lxolivera wants made (and I agree with him that it's important).

There is a real tension here (as illustrated in this thread). For each user (that already has hardware needing non-free drivers) it is better if the distros just put it in. But this is bad for Free Software as a whole, because it legitimises non-free drivers and hardware, and reduces the incentive for people to buy free stuff.

I try very hard to buy only hardware that works with free drivers, but of course its often hard to know. One can't blame 'average' users from buying whatever is (cheapest and) in front of them, especially if the software freedom issues are not even explained. OK a lot of them couldn't care less anyway, but currently for those that _do_ care there is almost no pressure to make manufacturers label their hardware in a manner which allows consumer choice. And very little progress has been made on this in the last few years. The graphics card situation has improved (on the desktop), but got worse on embedded. Not sure if network cards and wireless cards is worse of better - I think it's improved a little in that free drivers are available for some cards, but things like DVB-T TV tuner cards is a sorry area, and no doubt so are 3G dongles and the like.

Almost everything now has some firmware in it, and not much of that firmware is free. This is a bad thing. And I don't think we are doing a good job of fixing this problem collectively. Do you expect it to be better or worse in 10 years time?

I don't know what the answer is here but I'm glad to see linux-libre at least making the point that this is a serious issue that is being allowed to slide. On the one hand its great to see Linux desktops becoming more mainstream daily, but if none of those users understand why free software matters then I'm not sure we have sustainable progress - we'll end up with most people using some free software surrounded by proprietary parts and users will only be marginally better off than they were using a fully proprietary system.

I guess for those that only care about Open Source as a development model, then software freedom per se doesn't really matter. I suppose it's that divide that makes this thread so long :-)