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goals of the FSFgoals of the FSFPosted Sep 29, 2011 22:45 UTC (Thu) by pjm (subscriber, #2080)In reply to: Papering over a binary blob by geofft Parent article: Papering over a binary blob
Although I have never seen this stated, I would guess that the notion of freedom that RMS and the Free Software Foundation are concerned with is negative liberty. According to this uninformed guess, they are not concerned with your physical ability to fly like an eagle or modify circuitry, nor do they see any moral importance in whether you have software that enables you to do this or that (gives you the freedom to do this or that, one might say) (so don't see loss of (proprietary) software as a consideration when weighed against ethical considerations), but are only concerned in what others forbid you to do, for example by restrictive licenses. Another freedom commonly not sought by those who value freedom is the freedom to remove others' freedom. This would explain why the FSF don't object to copyleft licenses, which withold the freedom to make the code proprietary or impose any other restrictions. I've never lived in the US, but I get the impression that it's common in the US to understand words like "free(dom)" and "liberty" along these lines, and this might be why I haven't seen the FSF explain the sorts of freedom it is or isn't concerned with. If anyone has any contacts at the FSF, then it would be good if you could encourage them to be explicit about this. It's very common for people to see FSF positions as illogical, because they aren't familiar with these sorts of distinctions among freedoms. I think if the FSF were to be more explicit as to the reasoning for some of these things, then I think people would give more weight to their positions.
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goals of the FSF Posted Sep 30, 2011 4:56 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
I've seen the FSF/RMS criticized for many reasons, but I'm not sure I've seen them criticized for failing to explain their reasoning before...
goals of the FSF Posted Sep 30, 2011 9:43 UTC (Fri) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]
If you look just a couple of comments up, you'll see geofft writing "The Free Software Foundation has been remarkably good at endorsing things that deny users' freedom" and "call out FSF's for being dumb". Like all such comments that spring to mind, he doesn't exactly criticize the FSF for failing to explain reasoning, but does criticize them for being unreasonable.
I don't see anyone saying that the FSF never gives any reasoning. However, if you could point us to where they give reasoning for the situation described in the parent article, or more generally give reasoning for why it should be preferable to have logic in ROM or circuitry compared to upgradable software, or any of the issues that geofft or the author of the parent article apparently consider unreasonable, then that would be useful.
goals of the FSF Posted Sep 30, 2011 22:58 UTC (Fri) by ldarby (subscriber, #41318) [Link]
> However, if you could point us to where they give reasoning for the
> situation described in the parent article
See http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html
The FSF's stance is that it's unethical for a vendor to withhold the freedom to modify software from users. If it's physically impossible to modify it, then there's no ethical problem - it's the same situation as a product that doesn't have any firmware,
My take on all this is that that state of having no ethical problems is more important to this project than anything else, so to reach that they're removing their own ability to modify the firmware. That has to deserve the Ig Nobel prize in the field of Ethics...
goals of the FSF Posted Oct 2, 2011 19:28 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
Yeah, I have to say that it's a rather tortured exercise, adding an artificial hardware restriction so that the now-modified hardware maps onto the convenient "ROM exception."
The opaque blob is already effectively read-only. Adding this little microcontroller to do the copying so that the main CPU never sees it didn't get rid of the blob. It just papers over the problem, as the article states.
goals of the FSF Posted Oct 3, 2011 8:10 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]
> The opaque blob is already effectively read-only.
That would be true only if the producer had lost the source code, or something like that. Otherwise, the producer _is_ restricting you from enjoying some of the freedoms it has. If the blob is "read-only" because the producer has no interest in updating it, that's actually an even worse situation because _you_ might have good reasons to update the blob and yet cannot do that.
goals of the FSF Posted Oct 3, 2011 8:52 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link] Do these technical acrobatics with the microcontroller do anything about the fact that the manufacturer still has the source code and isn't sharing it? No. Why should these antics appease anyone's notion of "software ethics," then? When I said the blob is effectively read only, I mean it's unmodifiable by the end user. That's true whether it's a firmware blob on disk, bits blown in a ROM, or this technical charade that makes a blob that was once stored on disk behave more like bits blown in a ROM. The ROM exception in general just feels like a cop-out. "Oh, it's in ROM, so it's no longer software. It's OK to ignore it." What if the device has a test mode or ROM bypass that allows it to run the equivalent code from some loadable location? Now what? That ROM had source code somewhere, and there may be a way to execute a modified version of it on your end system even if you can't replace the ROM itself.
goals of the FSF Posted Oct 1, 2011 1:23 UTC (Sat) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
I doubt anyone at the FSF thinks that having logic in ROM is *better* than having it in upgradable software. But they want to have an endorsement that says "this device uses only free software", and that means that they need to define "free" and "software". This is a case where the device developers have decided that rather than making the firmware free, they will make it not-software.
I can't see any way to define "free software" that would let you avoid this kind of loophole. What would you do differently? The result is ugly, but at least it's clear that actually freeing the firmware would be a better solution, so the endorsement is serving its purpose of pressuring people to work on that. The FSF certainly has been always been willing to accept short-term inconvenience in maintaining a long-term emphasis on freedom.
goals of the FSF Posted Oct 4, 2011 0:08 UTC (Tue) by xilun (subscriber, #50638) [Link]
So software on a CD-ROM would also be not-software? Nonsense.
The limits of positive and negative Posted Sep 30, 2011 12:46 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] I'm not sure that the categorisation positive/negative is useful here. Does FSF campaign for your positive freedom to modify software? Or for the negative liberty to prevent others from stopping you from modifying software? Kinda the same thing really. RMS addresses this at the start of his speeches: Free Software [...] is software that respects the user's freedom. What do I mean by this? Because it's never enough just to say "I'm in favour of freedom", the crucial issue is always: what are the essential freedoms that everyone should have? From One of RMS's usual free software speeches, March 2006. So it's not so much a question of having as much positive liberty as possible, or as much negative liberty as possible. The point is to have whatever freedoms are necessary to live in a society where everyone can and be friendly and helpful to each other and can make use of their skills to improve their quality of life.
The limits of positive and negative Posted Sep 30, 2011 13:13 UTC (Fri) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]
> Kinda the same thing really.
In the situation discussed in the parent article, the FSF advocates removing the positive freedom to upgrade software, while (at least in the FSF's eyes, using the argument that circuitry can be overlooked) increasing negative liberty. So this is an example where they are not the same thing, which is why it seems like a useful distinction to make. However, I welcome your attempt to provide a different explanation, which looks promising even if incomplete (see below).
> The point is to have whatever freedoms are necessary to live in a society where everyone can and be friendly and helpful to each other and can make use of their skills to improve their quality of life.
[Was there text missing between "can and", or is the "and" spurious?]
The first of those seems connected with negative liberty. The second (improving quality of life) seems more connected with positive liberty, but might be seen as being in conflict with the recommendation to prevent people from improving their quality of life by upgrading software.
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