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Between Fedora 12 and 13Between Fedora 12 and 13Posted Dec 11, 2009 6:27 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)In reply to: Between Fedora 12 and 13 by Xnux Parent article: Between Fedora 12 and 13
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Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 12, 2009 4:31 UTC (Sat) by Xnux (guest, #62436) [Link]
I am aware of Fedora's licensing policies for binary firmware. Still, I don't believe that Fedora is being stringent enough. Even if a piece of firmware is redistributable, the community is at the mercy of the firmware copyright holder to provide updates, which probably won't happen at the rapid rate of Fedora's open source programs.
I understand that firmware helps make the distro available on more hardware, but I don't want that firmware on the kernel by default. The Freed-ora project (related to Linux-libre) provides such a firmware-less kernel for Fedora, but I don't have nearly enough technical expertise to bundle it with Fedora myself. That's why I hope the Fedora developers work on phasing out binary blobs by default.
Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 12, 2009 19:16 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
firmware needs to be updated at the rate of hardware changes/bugs, not at the rate of OS/application development.
the firmware provides an Interface that the OS then uses to manipulate the hardware. If the hardware doesn't change there isn't much need for the firmware to change.
remember that if a particular card doesn't have a firmware blob in the kernel, that doesn't mean that there isn't firmware, it just means that the firmware is in flash or ROM on the card, which is even slower to update.
so why are you willing to use a device that you can't update over one where you (or your linux distro) can pick which version of released firmware you are going to run on the device?
Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 13, 2009 0:55 UTC (Sun) by Xnux (guest, #62436) [Link]
My knowledge of how firmware works isn't that great, but I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have binary firmware. I'm saying that all firmware should be made open source. That way, anybody in the Fedora community could contribute source code, not just the copyright holders. Even if the copyright holders do contribute patches to firmware now, that doesn't mean the code will be high quality. Look at nVidia's nv driver--it is mediocre at best, and doesn't even provide 3D support.
I suppose I was under the assumption that blob = proprietary, but maybe I'm wrong. In any case, Fedora should not be content with redistributable-but-closed-source firmware--we need to work on providing open source firmware for different computer hardware as quickly as possible.
Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 13, 2009 3:08 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
while I wouldlove to see opensourced firmware, I really don't understand why people try to get firmware blobs removed from the kernel.
non-trivial hardware will not operate without firmware period.
that firmware may be in ROM on the chip.
it may be in flash on the card that requires special hardware to modify
it may be in flash on the card that can be replaced through the driver or other software when plugged in normally
it may be loaded at startup time from the driver.
in all four cases it can be a binary blob that I cannot modify.
in the fourth case I at least have the option of selecting which firmware blob (and there for which feature/api set that the vendor offers) I want to use. It is the most free of the four options.
yes it would be even better if it was opensource with full internal documentation of how the device was put togeather, but while that is something to strive for I don't see how arguing that devices that use firmware installed by the driver is worse than devices that have the same firmware in flash that requires a windows-only program to update makes sense.
Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 13, 2009 19:46 UTC (Sun) by Xnux (guest, #62436) [Link]
I'm not suggesting that we just drop all non-free firmware and ship that to everyone. Obviously, that would cause a huge amount of hardware to fail. I want a version of Fedora with no non-free firmware mostly for my own purposes, because I have hardware that can run on only free firmware and I do not desire to download proprietary firmware onto the CD that will install Fedora only to avoid using said firmware.
Projects like this already exist (e.g., gNewSense, Trisquel, BLAG, Freed-ora, Freed-ebian, etc.), but they are usually woefully behind the current releases of the distributions that they are based on (which are usually Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora). I want a distribution that combines Fedora's recent software packages and gNewSense's 100% software without having to settle for an out-of-date distribution (for example, gNewSense is still based on Ubuntu LTS, which is 8.04 Hardy Heron).
Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 13, 2009 9:37 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Fedora's licensing policies are far more strict than other mainstream distributions and firmware policy is called a "Exception" for good reasons. Fedora Project will continue to replace firmware with more free equivalents whenever possible. We were afaik, the first distribution to include the free and open source reverse engineered Broadcom firmware by default.
I am not sure what you want to do with alternative kernels but building such a image is fairly easy.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_a_Liv...
If you need further help, you are free to post to the Fedora list or even contact me directly.
Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 13, 2009 19:59 UTC (Sun) by Xnux (guest, #62436) [Link] I suppose what I am interested in doing is creating a version of Fedora that replaces the default Linux kernel with the Freed-ora version of the Linux-libre kernel (which can be found at http://www.fsfla.org/download/linux-libre/freed-ora/F-12/) and removes any software specifically affected by patents (e.g., Mono and its dependencies, MP3 playback, DVD CSS, etc.). That way, when I actually burn this custom distro to a Live CD, it does not contain any non-free or patent-encumbered software.
Thank you for your help.
Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 14, 2009 0:53 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Since there are probably (idiotic) software patents covering everything from linked lists to writing "Hello, world!", there just isn't a viable Linux distribution (or any other operating system, for that matter) that isn't patent encumbered.
Between Fedora 12 and 13 Posted Dec 14, 2009 5:26 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
It is fairly easy. As an example of custom Fedora Remix, feel free to take a look at
http://omega.dgplug.org/11/Live/i686/Omega-11-i686-Live.ks
Since the alternative kernels you are talking about is part of a repository, you can simply point to it within a kickstart file. Third party repositories usually have the repository files as part of foo-release that needs to be added to the kickstart file and software updater will be able to pick up updates easily. Gobuntu doesn't actually exist anymore btw and Fedora Project is unlikely to be interested in maintaining any kernel variants.
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