Freedom matters to everyonel, directly or indirectly [LWN.net]

Freedom matters to everyonel, directly or indirectly

Posted Mar 3, 2010 17:28 UTC (Wed) by viro (subscriber, #7872)
In reply to: Freedom matters to everyonel, directly or indirectly by Zack
Parent article: Linux-2.6.33-libre released

*snort* How about some non-faith-based arguments? There are damn good rational ones for "why source for firmware is generally a desirable thing"; none that I can see for that publicity stunt, but hey, maybe you guys can produce some...

If some luser duhveloper says "this code must work, because my ideology says it must and if you don't share my beliefs, there's nothing I can do, we are just culturally incompatible", the silly bugger will get a rapid and painful course of education in the reasons why solipsism derivatives are BS, why his beliefs don't mean a damn thing for reality and why his faith is not strong enough to avert the well-earned, er, uncomfortable sensations. Why should the same kind of crap be treated any kinder in this case?

Ideology is basically a set of heuristics. The output may be deemed more or less satisfactory by *external* criteria; without those all you've got is a dogmatic religion.

If you have rational and ideology-independent arguments for the tree "freed" in that manner, make those. If not, there's really nothing to talk about.

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Freedom matters to everyonel, directly or indirectly

Posted Mar 3, 2010 17:59 UTC (Wed) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link]

If it's any comfort, I don't understand most of your post either.

You seem to draw parallels between removing firmware blobs from the linux kernel and faith/ideology. I don't see the correspondence between those, since I'm not really a religious person, so it's difficult for me to correlate them in a meaningful way.

Fortunately you also write

>There are damn good rational [reasons] for "why source for firmware is generally a desirable thing"

If you could present those, that could be very useful.

Freedom matters to everyonel, directly or indirectly

Posted Mar 3, 2010 18:58 UTC (Wed) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

Read what lxo has written and tell me if his reasoning survives if you remove ideology. As for the rational reasons for firmware source being generally benefitial, they are obvious and mentioned in this thread. Starting with potentially improved odds of figuring out why given piece of hardware sucks in given way by whoever ends up having to debug the breakage caused by FPOS in question. Balanced by the risks of nausea from reading it, of course, but that's a separate story.

But the same odds are also improved by
* having hardware documentation that is not entirely full of crap
* having firmware not written in Object Intercal implemented in BLISS macros
* having no"! yes, sometimes the usual opcode for NOP deadlocks the branch predictor; we'll do a hardware fix someday, for now let them patch as(1)" in there,
etc. All of those are generally good things. And if some are *not* true, you'll probably have more good reasons to curse the bleeding vendor. Which doesn't mean that e.g. removal of fuloong 2f support would be an improvement (NOP breakage, making life rather interesting).

IOW, "P may make dealing with Y less painful" doesn't mean "P should be a prereq for doing anything with Y".

Freedom matters to everyonel, directly or indirectly

Posted Mar 3, 2010 21:12 UTC (Wed) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link]

Thank you.

If I understand your examples correctly, handling firmware can be a very painful experience, nausea inducing even.

But *if* I understood them correctly, I'm not clear on your objections against the linux-libre kernel.

If someone were to say that shipping (a part of) such a vendor's product and mentioning their products name was a subset of the term "endorsement", I would not find that unreasonable.

Now if that someone would say, "I do not want to endorse any vendor that would inflict such a painful experience on those kernel-hackers, even though I myself am not a kernel hacker and my kernel might be less functional.
", I would find such an action to be social and commendable.

Where could such a user go and download a kernel that he could use in the secure knowledge that he would not be unwittingly causing problems for kernel-hackers ?

Regardless of the exact background leading to the creation of linux-libre, the end result addresses the above question nicely; now such users can go and use the linux-libre kernel.

Now "not wanting to harm anyone though inaction" might have ideological connotations, but in my opinion is more of a simple act of solidarity than any sort of strict ideology.

Freedom matters to everyonel, directly or indirectly

Posted Mar 4, 2010 15:17 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]

I concur that this libre tree is more of a political statement than anything else. In that sense I support it; people can make whatever political statements they want and this statement says "Only fully supported hardware is welcome".

I disagree with the underlying philosophy, though, because Free drivers make the hardware less relevant to Freedom and a Free kernel makes the drivers less relevant and a Free desktop environment makes the OS less relevant, etc, up the chain of abstraction. Yes, if there is no Free OS then you are limited, but the mere existence of a Free OS means that you can preserve some of your potential Freedom even if you are running Firefox on Windows. If Windows hurts you too much you can switch to Linux if you haven't already.

Just like hardware: you are not trapped into a particular graphics card if your apps use OpenGL; don't like how your card works or how it harms your Freedom? Get a new one. In the meantime, at least your card works. It's hardly a trap if you can leave any time.