Free vs convenient [LWN.net]

Free vs convenient

Posted Oct 6, 2009 8:27 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Free vs convenient by dlang
Parent article: FSF offers "GNU Bucks" for finding nonfree works in free distributions

but it has been stated many times (including in this discussion) that it's _acceptable_ to have the firmware blob in rom or flash, but not acceptable to have it in ram.

So how is that a *preference* for ROM? As for this discussion, it's not quite clear to me who is speaking for the FSF and who is putting words in their mouth. (NB: I've nothing to do with the FSF, though I might have given them money in the past).

as for the claim 'users given the same rights as the manufacturers/developers', that's a nice sound bite, but I would argue that firmware blobs in ram already give the user more rights than the manufacturers as the user can decide at boot time which firmware to use. I don't see any way that the manufacturer can dictate that the user must update to a newer firmware blob. I have seen devices where one firmware has a feature that is removed in later firmware updates and users choose to use the older firmware to maintain them.

Well, there tend to be major differences in development attitude towards and the spread of its cost over the lifetime of a device, between devices whose working is hard to field-modify and those which are easy to modify. A hard-to-change device (ROM/most flash) will, on average, have had more effort put into development and QA prior to shipping. With an easy-to-change device (RAM/low-risk-upgrade flash), the vendor can afford to ship earlier obviously, and it will have more bugs initially.

Basically the 2 cases are, given the economics, not quite as equal as you claim. The 2 cases may be poles of a spectrum, and there may not be a sharp dividing line between them, but clearly at one end the user is getting a reasonably unprogrammable "device" and at the other they're getting a programmable device whose development cycles the market is expected to experience, just like any other software.

Why should firmware in the latter class be different from any other software, which the FSF would say end-users should receive source for?

Now, I know, at present, it's not completely pragmatic to eschew soft- uploaded firmware, and I fully agree soft-uploaded for local-devices is much better. However, it would be nice to get a world where we all get the source to such firmware, surely? We can't all walk their path, but the FSFs' idealism surely helps achieve it? Pragmatically, the FSF do not object to *end-users* using closed, easy-uploaded firmware, rather they encourage users to *avoid* such hardware.

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Free vs convenient

Posted Oct 6, 2009 9:39 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

when someone lists a bunch of products and labels the ones with ram firmware blobs unacceptable and says to buy the ones with the firmware blobs in flash (usually with windows-only update tools) or rom instead that is clearly preferring the ones with the firmware blobs in flash/rom.

I would love it for vendors to make the source of the firmware available.

you claim that the FSF position will drive vendors to open the source for their firmware, however by telling people to buy the products with the firmware locked down to flash/rom instead of the ones with it in ram, I see the push moving vendors the wrong way. it's a lot cheaper and easier to justify shutting up the FSF by adding flash (possibly by selecting a different cpu that includes flash on the chip for the next revision) than it is to go through all the business/legal hassle of releasing the source (and for companies that have never done this before, it is a hard thing to do)

asking for the source of the firmware would be good, but the reality is that much of what is in the firmware of devices is third-party libraries that the companies do not have the rights to release.

we still haven't managed to convince the industry that the firmware blobs should be able to be distributed with the OS instead of having to be extracted from the windows drivers, getting that message through would be a lot easier than convincing the companies that they not only need to release control over the binary blobs, but also the source for them as well.

Free vs convenient

Posted Oct 6, 2009 10:33 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

So you're taking practical advice, based on the current condition of shifting markets, and then extrapolating the FSFs general principled position from it. I'm not sure that's useful. E.g. at present there's a dearth of hardware with open firmware (though, some wifi is getting there with reverse-engineered firmware). If there were such hardware, it's more than reasonable to think the FSF would recommend it - therefore your "FSF recommends ROM over flash" extrapolation is clearly insufficient.

it's a lot cheaper and easier to justify shutting up the FSF by adding flash (possibly by selecting a different cpu that includes flash on the chip for the next revision) than it is to go through all the business/legal hassle of releasing the source (and for companies that have never done this before, it is a hard thing to do)

So we're all agreed on the principle that open firmware would be best, but you disagree with the FSF on how to advance toward that, right? The practicalities seems like something reasonable people could have lots of different opinions on. That said, I disagree somewhat with your premise that adding flash is cheaper than opening the firmware. I don't think that follows at all. If you believe that free software adds economic value over the long-term for both the users and the vendors (if you don't believe that it ultimately adds value to the vendors as well, then you believe free software is not sustainable), then clearly opening the firmware would be cheaper than adding to the cost of your device's BoM. This is ignoring the matter of just how much clout the free-software/free-firmware crowd have.

You may have a point here about the practicalities of advancing this agenda. I don't think though that it helps to try read the tea-leaves of the FSFs binary- blob-avoid hardware lists so as to, almost certainly (IMO), mischaracterise their position. That seems divisive and counter-productive to a longer-term goal that, very likely, nearly everyone here shares.

Free vs convenient

Posted Oct 6, 2009 17:54 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

in the long run I believe that open firmware would be best, but you do have to take into account industry norms.

right now the industry is just shifting from the firmware in flash/rom to the firmware in ram. the easiest political response to being attacked for firmware in ram is to move back to having the firmware in flash, not to have to convince lawyers and upper management to release the source.

I hope that this will eventually change, but right now it is still very hard to get the industry to release the source for things that they are clearly legally required to release. once complying with the GPL for derivative works and embedded code becomes normal the industry will start to loose it's fear and see some of the benefits. right now they are on the wrong side of things and so pushing them now moves them the wrong way