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

Posted Feb 16, 2017 12:46 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state by hifi
Parent article: This is why I drink: a discussion of Fedora's legal state

> 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..)