Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes:
> Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:
>> Yes. I want to promote fully free hardware and firmware. However, given
>> that very little hardware that does not require non-free firmware exists
>> at present
> I think there is something strange in this discussion: in my experience,
> there are MANY current hardware that doesn't require non-free firmware.
I believe that's because you are limiting the definition of "firmware" to
define most of the firmware in the system to not be firmware, in ways that
I find indefensible, so that you can make this claim. Maybe I'm wrong, and
I would be delighted to learn that free hardware is considerably more
mature than I think it is. But nothing about your examples seems
convincing.
That therefore makes this claim a, to be generous, marketing campaign, and
one of a type that I personally find quite off-putting because to me it
feels like lying.
> Aren't the NV41, VP2440, Z790P etc valid examples of such hardware from
> your point of view?
Just to take the most obvious and trivial thing that I can determine from
five minutes of web searching, every one of those systems contain Intel
processors, all of which have non-free firmware. So far as I know, there
are no current Intel or AMD processors that do not contain non-free
firmware.
I doubt that's the only non-free firmware in the system. It's just the one
that's very easy to see from basic descriptions without digging into the
specifics of the other pieces of hardware in the system.
I'm glad that they (or at least the one I noticed saying this) are using
coreboot firmware, and that is a step forward for free hardware, but only
a step. Replacing *one* of the many pieces of firmware in a current
computer with a free version is good, but it in no way makes the system
one that does not require non-free firmware.
To me, this is like claiming, in 1990, that your SunOS system was a free
software system because you replaced the user space with GNU tools and the
compiler with gcc. You did something interesting that was a step towards a
free software system, but... that's not what those words mean. A true free
software system required Linux or BSD distributions; the work on top of
proprietary UNIXes was a valuable step towards that world, but only a
step, and the free software community should not have claimed victory (and
did not!) after only replacing a few userspace tools.
> Or do you consider them marginal ("very little")?
No, this is a reference to the fact that RISC-V exists, and I believe that
it is at least possible to build a truly free CPU on that platform that
contains only free firmware, which could then be used as a basis for a
piece of truly free hardware. I don't know if anyone has done that work
because I don't follow free hardware closely (I support the movement but I
have a hard enough time keeping up with free software), but it may well
have happened and that would be truly exciting to me. I do think it's safe
to say that any such systems don't (yet!) have a significant presence even
among our user base.
--
Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
