Hi Leo, Leo Famulari <l...@famulari.name> writes:
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2025 at 01:55:46PM +0900, Maxim Cournoyer wrote: >> Which many concessions to pragmatism are you referring to? The only one >> I can think of is allowing devices to load their non-free firmwares, but >> I'm not even sure this was a concession, more of a 'I don't care what >> code runs outside of the kernel' position of Linus that I doubt has >> changed throughout the years. Perhaps sticking to GPLv2 *only* could be >> thought of another concession, as it doesn't defend against Tivoization >> the way GPLv3 does. > > Yes, I'm referring to choices made about software freedom. > > As we know from linux-libre, Linux includes many nonfree components. I > think this encourages hardware manufacturers to support Linux, because > they don't have to make any hard choices about business strategy (open > vs closed), and thus easier for hardware users. In practice, Linux-libre deals pretty much with a single issue: the non-free device firmware, whether its loaded from external blobs or directly embedded in C arrays in the source (which thankfully appears a rare practice nowadays). Not that it takes anything from your argument, just saying that outside of the nonfree device firmware question, Linux is pretty clean, I think, and has been pushing companies to contribute drivers in source form by not committing to keep their ABI stable, which breaks out-of-tree drivers on a regular basis (try building our zstd kernel module with the latest kernel and see!) and keeps them on the edge, in terms of maintenance. -- Thanks, Maxim
