Free vs convenient

Free vs convenient

Posted Oct 6, 2009 10:33 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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