From:
https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/ ... all.txt.en
2.3.1. Avoid Proprietary or Closed Hardware
Some hardware manufacturers simply won't tell us how to write drivers for their
hardware. Others won't allow us access to the documentation without a
non-disclosure agreement that would prevent us from releasing the driver's
source code, which is one of the central elements of free software. Since we
haven't been granted access to usable documentation on these devices, they
simply won't work under Linux.
In many cases there are standards (or at least some de-facto standards)
describing how an operating system and its device drivers communicate with a
certain class of devices. All devices which comply to such a (de-facto-)
standard can be used with a single generic device driver and no device-specific
drivers are required. With some kinds of hardware (e.g. USB "Human Interface
Devices", i.e. keyboards, mice, etc., and USB mass storage devices like USB
flash disks and memory card readers) this works very well and practically every
device sold in the market is standards-compliant.
In other fields, among them e.g. printers, this is unfortunately not the case.
While there are many printers which can be addressed via a small set of
(de-facto-)standard control languages and therefore can be made to work without
problems in any operating system, there are quite a few models which only
understand proprietary control commands for which no usable documentation is
available and therefore either cannot be used at all on free operating systems
or can only be used with a vendor-supplied closed-source driver.
Even if there is a vendor-provided closed-source driver for such hardware when
purchasing the device, the practical lifespan of the device is limited by
driver availability. Nowadays product cycles have become short and it is not
uncommon that a short time after a consumer device has ceased production, no
driver updates get made available any more by the manufacturer. If the old
closed-source driver does not work anymore after a system update, an otherwise
perfectly working device becomes unusable due to lacking driver support and
there is nothing that can be done in this case. You should therefore avoid
buying closed hardware in the first place, regardless of the operating system
you want to use it with.
You can help improve this situation by encouraging manufacturers of closed
hardware to release the documentation and other resources necessary for us to
provide free drivers for their hardware.
The Liberation fonts are a pixel perfect replication of the MS fonts.
