Between Fedora 12 and 13 [LWN.net]

Between Fedora 12 and 13

Posted Dec 13, 2009 0:55 UTC (Sun) by Xnux (guest, #62436)
In reply to: Between Fedora 12 and 13 by dlang
Parent article: Between Fedora 12 and 13

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.

(Log in to post comments)

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).