Papering over a binary blob [LWN.net]

Papering over a binary blob

Posted Sep 30, 2011 4:44 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338)
Parent article: Papering over a binary blob

The irony is that while this is causing bad press for the FSF, I bet no-one there actually *likes* this approach... it's more or less exploiting a loophole in their rules.

Their problem is, the result they *actually* want is for the firmware to be Free. Therefore, they definitely can't endorse a the "pragmatic" solution of just using the closed firmware -- there's a real danger that everyone will just stop there once their hardware is working, and the whole point of the FSF is to keep pushing for the full solution, even if that's not easy to achieve right now. That's a valuable role.

But in order to decide whether a device's software is sufficiently free, they feel that they need to make a bright-line ruling about what counts as "software", and it turns out that you can kluge around their definition by burning the firmware into the hardware.

I'm not saying that the FSF is actually opposed to this hack, just that it's hardly something they would support on its independent merits -- it's a corner they've gotten backed into. If anything, I think they'd actually consider it a bonus that this kind of hack is so ugly, exactly because it means that there's still incentive to solve the problem properly by freeing the firmware.

I'm surprised that the hardware developers are taking the trouble to do this to get the FSF's endorsement instead of just saying "well, we got as close as we could but there's still room to improve". But I guess that's their decision; I don't blame the FSF.

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Papering over a binary blob

Posted Sep 30, 2011 13:10 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

I'm sorry, but showing the firmware into ROM and sealing it up doesn't give any more freedom, it just takes freedom away. With such a machine I can't try out a FSF-free firmware at all. If they had taken this stand on the beginning, nobody would ever have heard of them: They explicitly targeted machines running very much closed operating systems, and the "GNU system" was just a thin random spattering of nicer-than-the-vendor's programs.

Papering over a binary blob

Posted Oct 2, 2011 5:13 UTC (Sun) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

> I'm sorry, but showing the firmware into ROM and sealing it up doesn't give any more freedom, it just takes freedom away.

Sure. But who's saying otherwise? They haven't said that they think that burning stuff into hardware creates a net increase in user freedom (or if they have, I'd appreciate a link!). They've said that it's enough to satisfy the specific rules of the "the software in this device is free" endorsement, because it does an end-run around their definition of "software".

If you really think that the FSF likes the idea of making software unmodifiable, then how do you explain their controversial insistence on anti-Tivoization language in GPLv3?

> If they had taken this stand on the beginning, nobody would ever have heard of them

I'm not sure what stand you're attributing to them, but yes, I think we can agree that if there was no such thing as software then indeed no-one would have heard of the FSF.

Papering over a binary blob

Posted Oct 4, 2011 14:04 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

The "no no-free software allowed anywhere" stand they are now taking was completely impossible when "the GNU system" was gcc, emacs and a spattering of nice-to-have packages which could only run under a Unix.

Papering over a binary blob

Posted Oct 4, 2011 23:01 UTC (Tue) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

Have you, um, read the GNU manifesto? Their goal in writing that software was always to produce a complete free replacement for Unix, and producing a spattering of nice-to-have packages was a nice side-effect along the way. AFAIK RMS has always argued that using non-free software is ethically acceptable if and only if you are using it to produce a free replacement.

That's their ideal, though; I wouldn't call it their stance. If they actually had a "no non-free software allowed anywhere" stance, then surely they'd be trying to squash tools like mingw, and the GPL wouldn't continue to have a special exception for linking against anything "normally distributed with the operating system"?

Papering over a binary blob

Posted Oct 2, 2011 5:23 UTC (Sun) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]

Yeah, I don't know why people care either. But, I also hope people don't start thinking of the FSF as irrelevant. On the one hand, many of the specific things they do are pretty useless or cringe-worthy. On the other, I more or less agree with their principles, and am really glad that there are people willing to stand up and make "radical" claims like "moral considerations are relevant to software development" -- it keeps the Overton window open wider. That's the most important thing they do, IMHO, and it's as relevant as ever.