This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 6:10 UTC (Thu) by hifi (guest, #109741)
Parent article: This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

This is what being practical means. It's great to know there are people like him trying to make things better while being reasonable for all parties involved.

I was a Debian user for quite some time but switched to Fedora for unrelated reasons and I have never looked back yet. It did, however, bother me that the Debian guidelines force (binary) firmware into the non-free repository. It's not that I don't understand the reason but it's one of those things that makes everything harder than it should be for the end user. You also get "exposed" to actual non-free software by enabling the non-free repository.

My personal belief is that hardware shouldn't be treated any differently if a firmware is uploaded as a binary file compared to being burned to a physical ROM on the board. It gives false impression of "freedomness" when older hardware with ROM firmware is compliant but modern that needs the uploaded blob isn't even though both use non-free firmware to operate in the end.

There are projects like nouveau trying to implement their own and that's of course a good thing but it's probably an endless road of pain as the generation of hardware moves faster than you can RE a firmware. Then NVIDIA started requiring firmware signing on the hardware so that ended abruptly.

Long term hardware that will be used for many years to come like the Raspberry Pi are probably the best targets for such effort as it doesn't get obsoleted as fast as PC GPUs and such.

to post comments

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 12:46 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> My personal belief is that hardware shouldn't be treated any differently if a firmware is uploaded as a binary file compared to being burned to a physical ROM on the board. It gives false impression of "freedomness" when older hardware with ROM firmware is compliant but modern that needs the uploaded blob isn't even though both use non-free firmware to operate in the end.

You left out a third case -- "stored in flash on the device". If the user lacks the ability to update the device firmware, the hardware is somehow "more free" than someone figures out how to update the stored firmware.

This is one of my personal beefs, and one of the very few areas where I strongly disagree with the FSF. I can understand the legal argument for why they draw the line where it is, but it's hard to see how arguing for a worse user experience is somehow a more moral stance, especially when the "uploaded as a blob" at least provides a path towards the possibility of truly Free Firmware being developed one day.

This isn't a theoretical argument; back in the day I was responsible for the drivers for the prism2 802.11b devices -- which started as non-user-updatable flash, became user-updateable due to horrible bugs in older firmware, and eventually lost onboard flash altogether as a cost-saving mechanism. Despite the ones lacking onboard firmware actually providing (by far) the best user experience, they were somehow the worst ones from a "freedom" perspective given that the proprietary firmware blob was completely identical.

(To this day, the firmware blobs I host on my personal website are downloaded about 4000 times a month, nearly entirely by Debian users..)

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 12:58 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (1 responses)

> My personal belief is that hardware shouldn't be treated any differently if a firmware is uploaded as a binary file compared to being burned to a physical ROM on the board.

For the hardware, it doesn't make a difference, but in the firmware upload case, your distribution is distributing non-free software, while in the ROM case, your distribution isn't distributing anything (since you already have it).

Ideological reasons aside, this means that in the firmware upload case, the distribution has to worry about the license for the firmware files.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 16:49 UTC (Thu) by hifi (guest, #109741) [Link]

Hasn't this been solved already for the firmware that has been included with the kernel? Those blobs should have redistribution rights for this very purpose.

I'm not arguing we should start packaging extracted firmware without consent from hardware vendors but when we do have that it should be a no-brainer to include them within distributions.

This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

Posted Feb 16, 2017 16:33 UTC (Thu) by jcrawfordor (guest, #114167) [Link]

On the upside, the Debian project does now distribute install images with nonfree firmware already included:

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd...

They're just "unofficial" and you have to do some digging to find them. This way I can do a netinstall on my laptop without having to sit by the ethernet jack.