FSFLA: Linux kernel is "open core"

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.