Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

Posted Dec 24, 2010 13:56 UTC (Fri) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715)
In reply to: Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze by gmaxwell
Parent article: Re: The "Free" Kernel In Debian Squeeze

> 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.