First-order effects

• Debian users get broader out-of-the-box hardware compatibility when Lenny ships, since kernel firmware for wireless cards, storage controllers, and GPUs no longer has to be sourced separately.
• Debian's developer community absorbs an internal rift: purists who backed excluding blobs must now either accept the compromise or migrate to stricter derivatives, while downstream rebuilds gain a clear template for handling non-free firmware.

Second-order effects

• Other distributions watching the vote get cover to make similar calls, accelerating convergence around 'free by default, pragmatic where hardware demands it' — which strengthens Linux's position with OEMs like Dell rather than forcing each vendor to negotiate exceptions.
• Strictly-free forks and derivatives gain a recruiting argument, fragmenting the ecosystem along ideological lines even as the mainline grows more commercially palatable.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, the definition of a 'free' distribution shifts from absolute exclusion of proprietary code to policy-managed tolerance — a structural change that makes Linux viable in markets (enterprise cloud, embedded) where firmware pragmatism is non-negotiable, a path later visible in Debian's reach from Wheezy to Microsoft Azure support.
• Firmware becomes a permanent fault line between upstream silicon vendors and free-software projects — one that resurfaces whenever opaque closed code misbehaves, as Debian's own disclosure of the Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake hyper-threading bug later showed.