[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
When an ISP requires the customer to use the router it supplies, does that router come with nonfree software also provided by the ISP? I would expect so -- because that would give the ISP a motive for this demand. The ISP wants to impose more control over the customer by making per run this software. This would also be a reason why imposition of the ISP's choice of router could do concrete wrong. However, there is a crucial question here. Does "router" mean an ordinary internet router, such as you could buy from ThinkPenguin and can run LibreCMC? Or does it mean "cable modem"? When I inquired about this two years ago, there were cable modems you could buy, but there was no cable modem that you could run with free software. Furthermore, I was told that they all had a back door for the ISP to change the software through. I concluded there is no benefit to having any other cable modem except the one that the ISP supplies. Thus, the issue for simple ethernet/wifi routers is very different from the issue for cable modems. Which one is this issue about? > in Czechia and partially thanks to FSFE's campaign we have > > a lot of people doing self-ISP and providing internet to others, see > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_provider That's a good thing in any case, but it would still be good to know the answer to the question above. > Though all that is not related to free hardware design. Router Freedom > is not related to free hardware. That is clearly true. -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
