Linux Foundation Welcomes LVFS Project (Linux.com)

Unless you were expecting ordinary users to have to download compilers and specialized tools for all sorts of weird architectures and build the firmwares on their computer every time?

In software, we have succeeded to a vast extent, but it's still not quite the majority but people are beginning to see the benefits and most people are (often unwitting) users.
In firmware, we have almost nothing - unless you count devices specifically designed to run bog-standard Linux as firmware, even the RPi firmware isn't "open". Coreboot died. Phones don't even attempt to use such facilities, they are all proprietary bootloaders, driver firmware and system firmware.
In hardware, we have, again, succeeded but only to a tiny extent.

At this point, it's time to realise that people don't recognise the benefits, and the only way to make them recognise the benefits is to get them into the ecosystem and onboard with all the things they *could* do. How much easier would it be if vendors didn't have to make a BIOS for every machine, but could just use an already-written one? The option's been then for decades but almost nobody uses it. You basically can't buy a modern machine with Coreboot, they don't exist.

Rather than "fight the losing battle", we have to lead people half-way and then it's up to them to drink. Treating them as unwelcome visitors will just make them even more unlikely to touch our ideals.

And what better way than a vendor-approved firmware service that lets them standardise and be supported?

Myself, as a programmer, open-source lover, systems administrator, etc.... sorry, but if I can't buy products that are OS, and there are no OS equivalents, I have to use something. Pretty much people in my position cannot be fussy. I could not move my employer over to OS and all-free-firmware. We'd have to accept major compromises in terms of functionality and supported hardware (almost nil!). Even though my IBM servers are supported on Linux to a vast extent, there aren't free drivers for most of the main critical components, and firmwares are all proprietary.

We always complain about the apocryphal "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" from the other side of the fence, but we don't embrace at all. It's almost impossible to convince such vendors to come 1% of the way towards us unless we're prepared to go 1% of the way towards them too.

As such a facility which *allows* proprietary firmware is necessary. Whether or not we use it that way. Nobody stopped git being used to develop closed-source code, or Linux to only run open-source binaries. There's a reason for that. It hurts us more to exclude them, than it hurts them to exclude us.

Nobody is saying that this facility will result in open-firmware. But if it didn't exist, closed-firmware would have to make its own way of doing so, which is a much worse situation.

It's time we opened up the evangelism to let people into our church - to see the benefits for themselves - rather than exclude them and have an isolated congregation.