Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

>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?