goals of the FSF [LWN.net]

goals of the FSF

Posted Oct 2, 2011 19:28 UTC (Sun) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)
In reply to: goals of the FSF by ldarby
Parent article: Papering over a binary blob

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.

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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.