Free software survives the original copyright holder

Free software survives the original copyright holder

Posted Sep 2, 2004 16:20 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Free software survives the original copyright holder by gdt
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

It will be interesting to see if the reasoning behind removing the PWC compression API is applied to various firmware download APIs in drivers.

That question has already come up, and the answer was that firmware is software for a different computer (in fact, there are hard drives with chips which are CPUs on other computers), and is therefore installing it through the kernel is not really different from sending a ISO image in response to an HTTP request with sendfile(); the only difference is that the other computer is connected by PCI and it's not far away.

The issues with binary drivers don't apply, as well. Changing the kernel behavior doesn't matter to the firmware; changing the host architecture doesn't matter either. The firmware might actually be written in something not usefully processable by end users (e.g., FPGA images aren't going to be written in anything that gcc handles).

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