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Request for commentsRequest for commentsPosted Mar 2, 2010 16:46 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)In reply to: Request for comments by pboddie Parent article: Linux-2.6.33-libre released
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.
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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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