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

Freedom matters to everyonel, directly or indirectly

Posted Mar 3, 2010 18:58 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

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".

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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.