On Thu, 2015-06-04 at 02:52 +0200, Adam Borowski wrote: > On Wed, Jun 03, 2015 at 06:18:37PM -0500, John Morris wrote: > > Non-free software: NO, Firmware: YES. So ixnay on things like the Nvidia > > drivers but yes on blobs. The reasoning on where to draw the line is > > pretty clear cut. > > How exactly firmware is not software? Both are strings of bits encoding > commands for a processor living in silicon you own.
So if the manufacturer puts the same firmware in an eeprom it isn't a problem? Or the BIOS itself? Are you running a Free BIOS? Do YOU know what your ACPI BIOS is doing right now? How about the CPU, those have loadable bits now, all entirely undocumented and closed. And lets not even open the can of worms over what Intel is doing lately in the of 'manageability.' I'm typing this on a Thinkpad, those have an entirely separate sixteen bit SoC 'embedded controller' with it's own OS that I have zero knowledge of what it is truly doing behind my back. In a more perfect world I'd agree that all that stuff should be open too, but it ain't, it ain't going to be. RMS managed to find -one- oddball machine that meets his definition of Free, if the vendor of that machine tried to sell them on the open market outside China they would find few takers. Bunnie's Novena 'Open Laptop' has blobs and closed 3d video drivers as well. Good luck tilting at this windmill. Where we can and should draw the line is in the kernel's address space. Blobs loaded into the kernel make the entire system untrustworthy and unmaintainable in ways a firmware blob loaded at initialization into an entirely different microcontroller managing WiFi doesn't. Not to mention that for regulatory reasons most vendors just aren't going to discuss the point with us. The situation stinks but changing it is beyond our current capabilities.
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
_______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
