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Request for commentsRequest for commentsPosted Mar 2, 2010 16:23 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Request for comments by tzafrir Parent article: Linux-2.6.33-libre released
Those who "want to run only Free Software" are a minority. Maybe I'm part of that minority, then, but maybe I'm just more aware (through experience) of the pitfalls of relying on proprietary software. And given that the majority have probably not considered such issues or regard them as peripheral - being able to run a program to do something now, but to not consider what they might need to use when they next need to perform the same task - it isn't really an informed majority who are involved here. BTW: I suppose you don't use a computer with non-free BIOS. Likewise a phone with a non-free GSM stack. Or a disk controller that uses proprietary firmware (such as the one in most DOKs). Yet people do care about these things. For example, one motivation for a free BIOS has been that of ensuring reliability: a "pragmatic" reason, to drop the magic word of people who belittle the efforts of anything to do with "freedom". And to continue your argument, one could equally observe that most computers already come with Windows installed and that everything seems to work, and then ask why anyone would need to change this. As with many aspects of modern life, one does have to ask whether people should be preoccupied with where their software comes from, just as they might wonder where their food, water, power, gadgets (and so on) come from. When someone offers alternatives in these areas, there may well be people whose observations amount to a cry of "nobody cares!", but then you have to question what the motivations of such detractors are, because "nobody cares!" is generally not the truth and certainly isn't an adequate response.
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Request for comments Posted Mar 2, 2010 16:46 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
pboddie, what I deduce from your reply that you don't care using a non-free device, as long as you can pretend you don't provide it the software.
Request for comments Posted Mar 2, 2010 19:23 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
Strange conclusion. You seem to imply that if he is oppressed, he should not care about it? Only those who have achieved freedom should ever desire it?
Request for comments Posted Mar 3, 2010 12:58 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I believe you're suggesting that I have the choice between a sealed unit that I can't change, which undoubtedly contains proprietary software or information, and an unsealed unit that I can only feed with proprietary software or information in order to make it work, and that I would therefore always choose the former. There is an argument that by discouraging use of the latter kind of hardware, people might indeed be tempted to choose the former, thus demonstrating an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality.
However, this isn't what the referenced project is all about. Aside from concerns about whose proprietary information is floating around in the kernel and whether its owners are comfortable with it being there, such initiatives make people aware of things such as device initialisation which is being initiated by the kernel, and raise the possibility of such processes being changed and improved. Immediately, there's an obvious parallel between these binary blobs and more traditional proprietary software which isn't easily waved away by using words like "firmware".
I concede that hacking the firmware of a hard disk controller, for example, would be a fairly specialised activity, but there might still be people interested in doing so. And the history of Free Software has demonstrated that what might seem like an uncommon area of marginal interest today could be a popular area of customisation tomorrow. The open hardware movement is showing that the choice I appear to have isn't always limited to those two options I mention above.
Request for comments Posted Mar 4, 2010 4:50 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Unfortunately, you will always be playing "out of sight, out of mind". Essentially every processor and every peripheral has firmware. Sometimes it's loadable, sometimes it's built in. I'm all for enabling people to program to the metal as much as possible, and I'm certainly concerned about what some of that proprietary firmware is doing. But in the end, the "entirely free" GNU/Linux based distros available today simply hide the problem, by only supporting hardware that does not allow its (completely hidden and proprietary) firmware to be replaced, plus the very few peripherals that have sufficient documentation to program for.
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