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FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core"FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core"Posted Nov 10, 2010 3:11 UTC (Wed) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702)In reply to: FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" by dlang Parent article: FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core"
I don't assume they do. I *know* many of them do *not* give a damn about this problem, or about Open Core. Which is why it's so deceptive when they play the we love Open Source, we promote Open Source, we do Open Source card: blobs, and combinations of blobs with any other software, aren't Open Source (or Free Software, obviously).
It's precisely because they don't care that we, the Free Software community, have to take the problem into our hands and deal with it.
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FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 10, 2010 13:20 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
Perhaps they do not care because they assume (correctly) that the firmware is part of the hardware, even if it is shipped separately. Developing free hardware, or freeing already existing hardware, while being a good thing, is separate from developing the Linux kernel.
FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 10, 2010 17:41 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]
> Perhaps they do not care because they assume (correctly) that the firmware
> is part of the hardware, even if it is shipped separately.
Wait until the day a security problem in a network card is exploited. The distinction between firmware and software maybe made sense in the day of ROMs, but right now graphics and network cards are effectively small specialized computers, and I see no reason why software for those computers should be treated differently.
As somebody else put it elsewhere in the thread, your computer without a software is a "nice brick" as much as your network card without its firmware. Yet, we call it with two different names.
FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 10, 2010 18:23 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
this isn't a new scenerio, and it doesn't require that the device firmware be loaded from the drivers.
back in the 80's MACs had problems along these lines where the device firmware (which was in ROM) had bugs that allowed bad things to happen.
the way that the firmware is loaded into the device doesn't change things.
people talk as if devices being smart and having embedded processors as if it's a new thing, but going all the way back to the c-64, the floppy drive had it's own cpu, and people reprogrammed it so that you could plug two floppy drives togeather and they would copy any floppy inserted into the first drive to the second drive without being connected to the computer.
note that the source for these devices was not available, but people were able to reverse engineer the devices (assisted by the excellent hardware documentation).
The critical feature that made this possible was that the firmware could be modified from the computer. This is why many of us see systems wher ethe firmware is loaded from the driver as being significantly better than systems where the firmware is locked in flash/rom. Nobody is arguing that such a device is as good as one with open source firmware, we are just arguing that it's better than the same firmware locked in flash/rom.
FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 11, 2010 12:26 UTC (Thu) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]
> we are just arguing that it's better than the same firmware locked in flash/rom.
I entirely agree with this.
FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 10, 2010 18:31 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> Wait until the day a security problem in a network card is exploited.
This does not change the fact that the firmware is part of the box we call "network card". Does it matter whether the security issue was on the firmware or for instance a race condition on a hard-coded sequencing logic? In both cases, it is a bug in the network card. And yes, it would be better if we could fix bugs in the firmware ourselves, or enhance it to add new features.
> As somebody else put it elsewhere in the thread, your computer without a software is a "nice brick" as much as your network card without its firmware. Yet, we call it with two different names.
So, let's call it the "network card kernel". The "network card kernel" runs on the network card, the "operating system kernel" runs on the main CPU, or the "application processor" as the smartphone people would call it.
They are still separate, unless your network card can run Linux itself.
Smartphones are an insteresting example: we have the application processor, which often runs Linux nowadays, and the baseband processor, which runs a closed-source GSM stack. Instead of going against the creation of drivers allowing Linux to talk to the closed GSM stack, making it impossible to productively run Linux on smartphones, isn't it better to allow Linux to dominate on the application processor, while separate projects like OsmocomBB focus on freeing the baseband processor (and only it)? An all-or-nothing approach can be very counterproductive.
FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 11, 2010 12:14 UTC (Thu) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]
> > As somebody else put it elsewhere in the thread, your computer without a
> > software is a "nice brick" as much as your network card without its > > firmware. Yet, we call it with two different names. > > So, let's call it the "network card kernel". The "network card kernel" > runs on the network card, the "operating system kernel" runs on the main > CPU, or the "application processor" as the smartphone people would call it.
That's fine. Just to make it clearer, let's call it "network card software". At this point the double standard being applied to "network card software" and "application processor software" should be obvious.
FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 11, 2010 21:00 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] I.e., if the bug is in silicon or ROM (that is, unfixable) it is A-OK; if it is in firmware to be loaded by Windows via Windows programs into flash memory it is OK, if it is in firmware to be loaded into RAM on the device it is anathema. I just don't "get" this "distinction"...
FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 10, 2010 19:18 UTC (Wed) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
> the firmware is part of the hardware, even if it is shipped separately
I'll remember that when the firmware starts being shipped separately from the kernel that requires it as much as the hardware. Then I'll say Linux is still proprietary software, because the firmware is still part of Linux, even though it is shipped separately, per cesarb's twisted logic :-)
FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core" Posted Nov 10, 2010 22:21 UTC (Wed) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
That would be really bizarre, because by that logic, it was never part of the kernel to begin with (you could count it as part of the kernel if by that you mean "distributed with the kernel", but not as "part of the code which runs on the kernel").
Either you use the same logic on both situations (meaning the firmware was always part of the hardware, and so you cannot say it was ever really "part of Linux"), or you use it on neither (so it was "part of Linux" and stopped being so after being moved to the firmware tree).
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