Dealing with the non-free firmware that is increasingly needed to install
Debian has been a hot topic for the
distribution over the past few months. The problem goes back further
still, of course, but Steve McIntyre re-raised the
issue in April, which resulted in a predictable lengthy discussion
thread on the debian-devel mailing list. Now McIntyre has proposed a
general resolution (GR) with the intent of resolving how to give users a way to
install the distribution on their hardware while trying to avoid trampling
on the
“100% free” guarantee in the Debian Social
Contract. Finding the right balance is going to be tricky as is shown
by the multiple GR
options that have been proposed in the discussion.

Source: LWN.net – [$] Debian to vote on its firmware path