Traditionally we've tried to give users an option to opt out of installing proprietary, non-free firmware when building images with pmbootstrap. Recent changes to pmbootstrap have disabled this mechanism, so now non-free firmware is always installed if it's needed to support functionality on a given device. All pre-built postmarketOS images have always included non-free firmware.
The mechanism behind this option was hard to maintain, not well tested, and sometimes builds would end up having non-free firmware installed anyway. It forced us to do weird tricks in APKBUILDs, sometimes causing firmware to be accidentally removed from devices. This has caused some really annoying regressions for folks, and is likely to be a reliable source of similar trouble in the future.
In an ideal world, hardware would work without the need to load proprietary non-free firmware. Unfortunately, we live in a world where this is increasingly not true. Many bootloaders load a lot of non-free firmware on boot that users cannot replace or ignore. Many chips, such as the GPU, WiFi, Bluetooth, modem, video decoding, etc. in your devices require proprietary firmware before they'll even function at all. Some modern devices can't even be charged without loading proprietary firmware - the battery will literally drain away while it is plugged in if this firmware is not loaded!
For the vast majority of cases none of this proprietary, non-free firmware gets executed on the main processor, it will only be loaded into secondary processors and run there. Most devices have strong memory separation so a rogue firmware shouldn't be able to take over the system.
We understand this situation is far from ideal, but after much thought we felt it was more important to stop spending time on this barely working, not well tested feature, and instead strive to bring free software to more people and create a distro that works "out of the box" on as many devices as possible.
- Related: !2255
- "Free Software Policy with Semi-Firm Firmware" Talk @ FOSSY 2023