On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 07:01:50PM -0500, Richard M Stallman wrote: > be pushing it a bit to defend it by claiming that they might be used in > 100% Free settings. > > But that is not the issue here. The issue is about drivers which, > for certain hardware, will not work at all without the loading of > non-free firmware. > > If we include those drivers unmodified in our version of Linux, users > will try them, and when they use the devices that require non-free > firmware, they will ask "how do I make this work". And someone will > tell them "here's the file you need", meaning the blob, and they will > "fix it" by installing the blob. > > We should change these drivers to make report clearly "This device is > not supported" instead of trying to load the blob.
Somewhat related to this: I've been toying with the idea of writing a desktop session daemon, technically similar to Ubuntu's "restricted-manager", but with a different purpose: detect devices that require non-free firmware (based on bus id heuristics), and display a message explaining the user why these aren't supported, and discouraging him/her from buying hardware from this vendor. Maybe I get to it when I find some free time. -- Robert Millan The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all." _______________________________________________ linux-libre mailing list [email protected] http://www.fsfla.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-libre
