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Papering over a binary blobPapering over a binary blobPosted Sep 30, 2011 13:10 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)In reply to: Papering over a binary blob by njs Parent article: Papering over a binary blob
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.
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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"?
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