rg287 - Re: Not for noobs
You are perfectly right if we consider only the technical aspects. However there are two things that you and others on this site are largelty missing:
1 - Support - as a distributor they have a minimal obligation to acknowledge and solve technical problems, just like this one affecting wireless drivers. They can't simply tell you to shove off because they did not write those drivers and they have no leverage against the hardware manufacturer. So the distribution is all stuck until Intel, Nvidia and Broadcom of this world bother to take a look at the bug. To put this short, they can be held accountable only for the code they produce but you as an end user will not swallow that.
2 - Licence compliance issues - not all firmware and drivers are freely redistributable. You need special permissions to do that and it takes a legal team to read and understand those licensing contracts. So when lawyers come at their door, Debian can safely throw the non-free version under the bus like in 'we didn't do it!' and still have something to offer to the rest of us happy to tinker with.
They're not the only distro doing this separation between free and non-free.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
