Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes: > 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.
Ok, now this become a bit more clear to me. It seems there are two things at play here: 1) Hardware-bound firmware shipped with the physical hardware. 2) Supplied firmware provided to the hardware by the operating system. If I understand you correctly, you believe these two are the same thing, and you are using the term "firmware" to refer to both and, further, that you believe it is not possible to separate these two kind of firmwares. Or that it could be possible to separate them, but you find doing so indefensible. Is that (more or less) your position? If so, I think we found some fundamental aspect to disagree on. I find these two situations clearly different, and believe it is worth upholding a distinction between them. I also believe blurring these two cases and referring to both using the same term lead users to make poor decisions. Granted, if both the 1) and 2) firmwares were free software, I suppose none of us would see any concern with this. It is only when the firmware code is non-free this distinction becomes important (to me). That's because I work with software and my main influence and control is over what goes into 2). To me this is comparable to saying "owning music on a CD" or "streaming music from a service" is the same, and there are commercial incentives to make people perceive this to be the same so they don't realize (or prioritize) that they lose some rights with the latter choice. > 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. Agreed -- that's why this is a long-term challenge. The free SOFTWARE community can only help with providing the software necessary to solve this. We have completed this to 100% already, Debian Buster and Debian Libre runs on modern systems, and there are several other 100% free OS'es around. Some free HARDWARE community is needed to resolve the hardware concerns. Alas, the hardware side of this effort is more incoherent than the software side. There are definitions similar in spirit to the Free Software Definition or the DFSG for hardware, but it has not reached anywhere the same acceptance or adoption. It doesn't seem reasonable to blame the lack of adequate hardware on software people. That ought to be the responsibility of hardware people, and that's where help is needed. The hardware people are pushing back and asks software people to solve their problems because they don't yet have the same toolset as we do. And I suppose this is reinforced by us software people believe we can do a better job than hardware people because we have better tools available. I argue this all leads in the wrong direction. Hardware freedom concerns has to be resolved by the hardware community, it cannot be solved software people. /Simon
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