Comment 14 for bug 1305839

The key difference in my mind is recoverability. In the server case, the install is by nature largely automated, and often will fail altogether if you don't for example have the ability to configure your hard drives.

Perhaps an analogy for the desktop would be to ask the question - what if a popular, common device that was required for system installation in a large percentage of cases required a non-free driver to be on the disk and used by default. We would certainly opt to make that device installable; consider our approach on phones, where we accept binary blobs and invest a lot to deliver a free userspace.

I don't think we're crossing a significant new line here. There are many pieces of no-charge proprietary software we COULD be installing to "make the product better", but we don't, given our values. In this case, I see no moral high ground in crippling the install unless someone answered an ideological question. We often forget how hard it is for new users to come up to speed - we know all the permutations and combinations and tradeoffs, most users do not.

Consider also how comfortable we are enabling people to run Ubuntu on proprietary clouds - where they will never see the code beneath the code, as it were.

Having said all this, I didn't clarify earlier that this mechanism should only be used for hardware which has no free driver. We should always silently select the free driver if such a driver exists, and if people want to go hunting for a proprietary one, ensure they can find them in a standard, supportable, upgradeable fashion, but not use it by default.