On 7 Jan 2008 07:58:04 -0800, Unix Fan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > Modern technologies like Wireless cards are little complex computers, some > time ago, > vendors decided it would be easier to ship the "firmware" inside of the > "Proprietary" > Windows driver and "upload" it onto the card at initialization time. (Instead > of storing it > permanently on internal flash/ROM memory.)
To RMS, binary-only firmware is unethical (and in the case of Linux such inclusion violates the GPL... man oh man, surprise surprise): http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FreeSoftwareAnalysis/FSF ----- From: Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: License questions Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 13:45:49 -0500 > > * Sourceless firmware is currently allowed in Fedora as long as it is > > redistributable. Refer to > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#BinaryFirmware for > > more information on this. Is this considered to be allowed by FSF? The question is whether it qualifies as free software. Firmware is software, and non-free firmware is non-free software. (Which processor the software runs on is just a detail.) Since these programs are binary-only, they are clearly not free software. (They are also not open-source.) Their inclusion in Linux itself is a violation of the GPL, but the Linux developers don't seem inclined to enforce the GPL against that violation. At present, essentially all GNU/Linux distros include the non-free firmware, because it was too hard to remove. So we decided to overlook the issue for the time being, and not reject distros on this account. This applies to Fedora the same as to other distros. However, progress is being made on removing non-free firmware from Linux. As this becomes feasible, and after some more time goes by, we will no longer want to make an exception for this category of non-free software. ----- regards, alexander.
