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Inducing others into the trapInducing others into the trapPosted Mar 4, 2010 16:23 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)In reply to: Inducing others into the trap by foom Parent article: Linux-2.6.33-libre released
But the hardware with non-free firmware in ROM or Flash -- who knows if you can even replace that at all! Might as well toss that hardware out, you'll probably never get free firmware for it! So you surely don't need to include any support whatsoever for *that*. Good luck getting the firmware for your computer monitor, your mouse, your keyboard, your PSU, your UPS, your KVM, your television, your television remote controls, your telephone, your refrigerator, your washing machine, your toaster, your coffee maker.... So much harmful firmware everywhere! Or maybe not. My monitor has poorly translated menus (what does "Input Not Support" mean?) and a quirky interface, but it gets the job done. My mouse works. My keyboard works. My KVM has some quirks (doesn't work with one of my mice, and doesn't cache EDID information for my monitor) but also works well enough to be useful and worth what I paid. I suppose I could try to get firmware source for all of this. I could even set about fixing the few quirks. But, realistically, I won't and it's unlikely anyone else will either. I guess the flip-side arises with safety critical firmware, such as what's behind all the Toyota sudden acceleration fiasco. But, I don't know that you really want to let anyone with a basic knowledge of assembly code actually tinkering with that. Broader review though would potentially be helpful. In the end, though, there's another freedom that we shouldn't forget: The freedom to not sweat the small stuff. If my analog phone gets replaced with a digital phone that does substantially the same thing with similar reliability, do I lose freedom if I don't get the source code with the phone for the firmware that handles "redial" and such? In a very technical sense, I suppose so. But, if the phone comes to me as an appliance that does what it's advertised to do, no more, no less, I gain the freedom of not caring about what else it might be capable of doing. And if it doesn't work as advertised, I can fall back on the implied warranty of merchantability/fitness for a particular purpose. Now, sure, we should all have freedom to tinker, but that doesn't mean JTAG headers should start popping up everywhere. It just means I shouldn't get sued if I break the warranty-voiding stickers on an otherwise black box. Indifference is not hostility. (Laws like the DMCA are actively hostile in this space. Most of the time, though, manufacturers simply don't care.) Some things will be more tinker-friendly than others, and tinkerers can vote with their dollars. The sad reality is that there isn't a lot of money in catering to tinkerers in mass-market devices.
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Inducing others into the trap Posted Mar 6, 2010 14:41 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> there's another freedom that we shouldn't forget: The freedom to not
sweat the small stuff
Great quote! I remember the days of scouring Fry's entire inventory
If this project was more Harald Welte style, where one would contact
However, simply removing firmware blobs from your own kernel is unlikely to
If you're simply trying to get that nice clean FLOSS feeling, you can get
Thanks for volunteering Posted Mar 6, 2010 18:26 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
Your efforts in contacting companies and getting them to release the firmware source code, and then developing the Free replacements, are definitely something that would fit in nicely in the project.
Meanwhile, while you're too busy criticizing what you don't understand (your failure to see the upside is enough evidence that you don't), we will keep it making it easy for people to tell whether they made a good hardware choice, so as to encourage more people to do so, so that the companies feel the pressure and make the decision to release the firmware in spite of your not doing your part to that end. Still don't the upside?
Thanks for volunteering Posted Mar 6, 2010 18:34 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I believe that bronson has a good point that this effort needs to concentrate
on getting firmware replacements in place to not regress on the user experience and make the hardware usable for users who have already bought them
Freedom is good but freedom with a awesome user experience is better and
Thanks for volunteering Posted Mar 6, 2010 19:28 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
Bronson has a good point that the efforts of reaching for vendors and trying to get them to release their firmware as Free Software is useful. But that would be no help in ridding Linux of the pollutants it has now. Even if the vendors released the bits, someone would have to clean things up. So, no, I don't see that this effort we make needs to concentrate on something else. It's two separate, independent valuable efforts.
As for user who have already bought stuff, giving them easy access to the stuff they're addicted to will just keep them addicted, perpetuating the problem of making decisions that are harmful to themselves and to everyone around them.
You might call the shining colors they see while under influence of those substances an awesome user experience; I call that hallucination, and I don't think it's any good.
But I don't think you regard the hallucinations as an awesome user experience, because you also appreciate the efforts that went into setting nouveau completely Free, so that now the experience can be really awesome.
Thanks for volunteering Posted Mar 6, 2010 19:36 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I see the efforts as definitely complimentary and freeing the firmware to
make the hardware more useful is no addiction and is a step up towards preserving freedom and providing the practical benefits at the same time and yes you might need to do some clean up work but that is no different from any code being released
Thanks for volunteering Posted Mar 6, 2010 19:47 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
Your response gives me the impression that we've miscommunicated.
It would be very odd to say that freeing up the firmware is an addiction, as you seem to have understood from what I wrote. Quite the opposite. Freeing up the firmware is a great thing, for it makes the device usable in freedom, regardless of whether it's the vendor that liberates it or some reverse engineer who writes a replacement and sets it Free.
The addictive and harmful stuff that I alluded to was the non-Free software (not just firmware) that so many distros insist in giving users easy access to, using arguments that come across as oxymoronic to me: that this would improve the user experience. Keeping users fooled, controlled, spied, dependent, divided and hopeless is not awesome, it's awful. Getting the impression that offering these addictive substances to users will solve any technical or social problem is IMHO yet another hallucination induced by these substances.
Thanks for volunteering Posted Mar 6, 2010 20:10 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I wasn't talking about distros at all and that is a distraction from the
point I was making which is that while freedom is a good value it is a bit more abstract for a lot of users and you should try your best to provide a good user experience and consider participating in efforts to write free firmware replacements such as the OpenFWWF one for Broadcom
When Fedora includes the firmware by default a lot of users were pleasantly
To give another example we had for several years talked about how
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 20:59 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
Sustainable distribution of non-Free Software (no matter how much Free Software is put in the mix) doesn't seem like a goal I share, or something I'd like to be involved in :-(
Now, if you meant that feeding people's addictions to non-Free Software will somehow pave the way for software freedom for all, and get everyone to, some day, stop using all the non-Free Software they became dependent on (it doesn't have to be the same day for everyone, mind you), I'm very interested in reading your thoughts on how to accomplish that. Thanks in advance,
BTW, 3D doesn't work on ATI cards on systems with only Free Software installed. In fact, without the non-Free firmware, loading up the radeon driver messes up the whole system, as I have experienced first-hand, and that others confirmed in this discussion.
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 21:18 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
To repeat I was referring to distribution of free and open source drivers
as the more sustainable path and who said anything about sustainable distribution of non-free software? You seem to be reading things which I have never said and doing it repeatedly for some reason and asking me to justify things I have never said is pointless and annoying
Progress often happens in stages and again Nouveau is a good example of
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 22:00 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
You wrote of distributing the software for wireless cards and ATI video cards to work out of the box, but those are unfortunately not Free Software. You wrote including this non-Free Software (and also some Free Software) convinced users this was a more sustainable path in the longer term.
Sustainable means it's something one can keep on doing indefinitely. Whether or not distributing mixtures of non-Free and Free Software is suitainable is not relevant to the goals of liberating the cyberspace, eliminating non-Free Software and enabling all users to be Free. Why would we want or even care that this is sustainable?
Progress is welcome, and nouveau is indeed a great example, which is why it is cited in the article. (BTW, thanks for letting me know about advances that were quite unexpected to me!)
Hut firmware for ATI video cards and many WiFi cards are counter examples to the progress. Instead of motivating people to write replacements, they accommodate people in their addiction, and induces others to enter the progressive addiction path.
Your writing seems to given equal value to the just-Freed nouveau and the proprietary software that controls ATI video cards and many WiFi cards, to the point of saying we needed to provide users with more of the latter. I strongly object to that notion. If you didn't mean to suggest that, I'm very interested in knowing what it is that you're actually suggesting.
(reads again)
Here's another possibility of reading what you wrote that, although requiring some corrections and assumptions, indicates I've misunderstood much of what you wrote:
When you wrote of wireless cards and happily-surprised users, you were only referring to b43 cards on which openfwwf worked, not to wireless cards in general. Now, I don't know whether Fedora shipped the non-Free firmware for b43. If it did, as I assumed because it ships non-Free firmware for lots of WiFi cards, users wouldn't be surprised with the inclusion of openfwwf, but they would have been surprised years ago when Fedora started adding non-Free firmware.
When you wrote of 3D on ATI video, you made a mistake, because 3D doesn't work on ATI video cards unless the non-Free firmware is loaded. Even nouveau, as currently provided in all Fedora releases that have ever included nouveau, still requires has non-Free blobs built into it. The exception is the last two or three builds in the development tree for F-13, that has 2.6.33 patched with the post-2.6.33 fixes that finally made 3D on nVidia cards functional without non-Free Software.
So, if you were speaking only of openfwwf and the just-Freed nouveau as examples of stuff we need more of, and the reference to ATI was a mistake, we're in full agreement. But if it was something else, can you please clarify? TIA,
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 23:02 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Your second reading is closer to my position than your first reading which
has a lot of misunderstandings in it but you haven't got everything I said correctly
Nouveau is a example where progress happened in different stages
a) A few people participated in writing a completely free driver
I am suggesting that the Radeon driver can progress this way as well and
"Now, I don't know whether Fedora shipped the non-Free firmware for b43. If
Your assumption here is wrong because the non-free firmware for b43 is not
If Fedora included the non-free b43 firmware somehow then Free replacement
I am suggesting that freedom can lead to a better user experience which is
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 21:50 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Without the non-free firmware the card works fine, if unaccelerated. And I
far prefer a small amount of non-free firmware and a large body of free software to the memory-leaking slow dysfunctional closed unfixable horror that was fglrx...
I'm not going to chastise ATI/AMD for going from adamant hostility to free
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 22:09 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
Their change in stance was welcome. They didn't have to rewrite the blobs, though. They could just set them Free, or release enough info so that others can rewrite them. Surely they have either if not both.
My old ATI card works fine only if I blacklist the radeon driver. I had it completely disabled for a long time (it didn't work after replacing the blobs disguised as sources with empty arrays), and when the blobs were moved out of the tree, I tried again, but then I ran into the interrupt storm, figured it still wouldn't work and moved on.
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 23:50 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Personally, I'm glad they chose to release info and get working on the
code as soon as they could, rather than waiting for God knows how long for the lawyers to clear *everything* before starting any work at all. The wait for docs was years long as it was.
The interrupt storm, well, IRQ support is very new and IRQs are only
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