Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

Posted Dec 23, 2010 18:45 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668)
In reply to: Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze by gmaxwell
Parent article: Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

The problem is that without blobs getting loaded at the proper time, lots of hardware will (mysteriously, sometimes) fail to work at all. This could make the machine a brick, or at least disable major functionality.

I think a better approach would be to load the blobs, but print a diagnostic message with an easily-grepable phrase in it, something like "Loading proprietary blob xxx for device xxx". That way, you can see how free your hardware is, and if the non-free devices are ones you can replace or disable.

Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

Posted Dec 24, 2010 12:48 UTC (Fri) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (3 responses)

> That way, you can see how free your hardware is, and if the non-free devices are ones you can replace or disable.

This is not about drivers but firmware, the firmware does not become magically free only because it is stored on a different medium (some EEPROM, FLASH or whatever) compared to disk.

Why do people insists on "firmware that is stored on disk must be free" but don't care about the ones stored elsewhere?

This makes zero sense to me. Basically people are lying to themselves by using the "if it isn't on my harddisk it doesn't exist" logic.

Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

Posted Dec 24, 2010 13:06 UTC (Fri) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link] (2 responses)

>Why do people insist

For rather pragmatic reasons: If you have some firmware on your disk and you can't modify it, understand, and distribute the result then the _only_ thing preventing you from doing so is copyright/patent/regulatory related restrictions or intentionally manufactured obscurity.

If we accept the notion that people interested in advancing the cause of free software don't want to see copyright/patents used to reduce the freedom that you have to manipulate your system, then it follows that it may be sensible for them to avoid firmware blobs on disk since these are acute examples of this kind of restriction.

It would be a good thing from the perspective of having the freedom to control your own property if the internal design/specifications for the devices were open too, including any firmware embedded in rom. But there are additional genuine complicating factors getting in the way of executing freedom there (e.g. can't exactly update a rom without cracking the case), and generally we're a lot further away from openness existing in hardware today.

In order to get to a more open world it's practical to push on the parts which are easiest to change and most beneficial first. Thus pushing for the elimination of runtime loaded non-free firmware. Once all thats free, perhaps the next step is to push on updatable pre-loaded flash firmware, and so on.

Another reason is avoiding the slippery slope of losing freedom that we had before because it's now implemented on a co-processor powered by "firmware". It's no longer surprising to see a "GPU" with more gates and basic operations per second than the CPU. Should we not care about software freedom for the code running on this part of the computer so long as someone is calling it "firmware"?

So, returning your question Why do people who don't share these concerns keep insisting that people interested in avoiding non-freely licensed firmware don't actually know what firmware is? What do you imply that I haven't thought out the reasons for these preferences?

Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

Posted Dec 24, 2010 13:56 UTC (Fri) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (1 responses)

> For rather pragmatic reasons

This can be used as an answer in pretty much any free vs. non free debate.
"Why do people want run that closed source driver?" -> "For pragmatic reasons they want to use their hardware" ...

> In order to get to a more open world it's practical to push on the parts which are easiest to change and most beneficial first.

The vendor can just decide to pay the couple of cents for embedding it in ROM without changing anything on the firmware license itself. Moving stuff around does not make it free.

> Why do people who don't share these concerns keep insisting that people interested in avoiding non-freely licensed firmware don't actually know what firmware is?

I didn't say that, my point was rather that whether firmware is free or not has nothing to do with the medium it is stored on.

> What do you imply that I haven't thought out the reasons for these preferences?

Because claims like "100% free system" are plain wrong (which is often used by people removing on disk firmware but ignoring the embedded ones).

Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

Posted Dec 24, 2010 15:33 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

>> For rather pragmatic reasons

>This can be used as an answer in pretty much any free vs. non free debate.
>"Why do people want run that closed source driver?" -> "For pragmatic >reasons they want to use their hardware" ...

Yes, but the tendency I've seen in such discussions is for the non-Free proponents to brand the Free Software proponents "zealots" and "fundamentalists."

I suspect that the "pragmatic" comment was a preemptive assertion that Free Software proponents have reasons for their choices with a different set of value assessments, timeframes, and scopes than non-Free people. That's how I took it anyway.