David Craven <da...@craven.ch> writes: >> vanilla Linux (which includes more than 150MB of binary blobs) > > Can you provide a reference?
I can’t find it any more (I think I saw it in an interview, but I cannot find the article any more) and it looks like I was quite wrong about this number. My apologies! It’s closer to a total of 6MB of blobs that come with the sources of vanilla Linux (as of 4.10-rc8, checked by comparing the uncompressed sources with a deblobbed version), most of which are in the “firmware” directory. Of course this doesn’t mean that it’s 6MB in every compiled binary. > I'm pretty sure the kernel developers care about free software too. I’m not so sure given how there’s no official mechanism for users to exclude blobs e.g. with a simple configuration flag. The defects of linux-libre which make it so that users have no choice whether to load or refuse to load a blob are also a consequence of the general lack of attention that kernel developers give to the issue of blobs. Accepting pre-built binaries as part of kernel sources (6MB is quite a lot of binary gibberish) is a strong indicator to me that at the very least their concern for free software is expressed very differently from mine. > But I'm not going to justify my actions any more. No need to justify anything. We’re just expressing different perspectives. -- Ricardo GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6 2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC https://elephly.net