Adam Bolte <abo...@systemsaviour.com> writes: > If my above assumptions are correct, why treat graphics driver firmware > specially? I'm certainly not saying it's wrong to demand free firmware, > however I'm curious why some firmware is treated differently. Is it because > one lives in your filesystem on your HDD, but the other is stored in an EEPROM > (and if so, why does this matter)?
Yes, for me, that's it exactly. I distinguish between devices that require non-free firmware to be uploaded each time I turn them on and devices that have firmware inside but don't require me to touch it. It's important to me to draw clear lines between the free and the non-free software. I don't want my operating system project to have to distribute non-free software, because fully-free operating systems are so much more powerful as an advocacy tool. That's why I use Trisquel; because it makes no exceptions. Beyond that, I also think it's important that we have free firmware for devices that come with it embedded such as motherboards and hard drives). These are a smaller violation of freedom though, and cleanly segmented from operating system distributions. Right now I prefer instead to focus on the bigger problems for freedom such as Skype and Adobe Flash. Ben
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