On Jan 21, 2009, Richard M Stallman <r...@gnu.org> wrote:
> If we're talking about drivers, the user won't usually know they're asking
> for firmware files, unless she's knowledgeable enough to check dmesg.
> OTOH
> I think it's bad to assume the firmware is always going to be non-free.
> It
> could be liberated, or others could write a replacement, and then not
> having
> the ability to load the free version becomes a technical inconvenience.
> When someone frees a firmware package, we can add the driver we
> previously removed. I don't think that firmware blobs will be freed 5
> times a day thus and overload us ;-{.
Removing all the code in a driver, rather than simply disabling its
requests for non-Free firmware, creates another major burden: any patch
that touches files in that driver becomes an additional maintenance
burden. Cleaning up patches is already the most time-consuming portion
of the job of maintaining Linux-libre.
Because of the currently-taken approach (removing blobs and disabling
drivers), it doesn't add up to much time; it's far less than what it
used to require when drivers were completely removed because of non-Free
blobs in them.
I wouldn't want to grow it back, and even more (out of covering other
drivers that never had non-Free blobs in them) unless it makes a major
significant moral difference.
If it's not clear whether it's ethically better to remove a driver
entirely, or to remove just the portions in it that might promote the
use of non-Free software, I'll take the latter, out of major practical
differences.
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/ FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer
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