Re: [Trisquel-users] amdgpu is considered "open source", but how is it considered worthy of deblobbing by the Linux Libre kernel?

[dguthrie]

Officially, the firmware blobs are not distributed with the kernel (they are  
hosted in the "unofficial" linux-firmware git repository), so the source code  
on its own is free. I've seen people on Phoronix make this rather weak  
argument.
It isn't just firmware though, it's various binary files that pretend to be  
things they are not. Some drivers are also "obfuscated" like the nv driver  
for Nvidia cards, to make it harder to read the source code.
Basically they don't really care that much. They care as long as the kernel  
gets new drivers and modules, and get angry when violations occur that  
prevent this, hence the anger at Nvidia. I think the aim is to get it to be  
widely used (which is fair enough) and I think that many individual  
contributors do care about freedom but they are a bit lax, hence allowing the  
submission of drivers that are basically a shim for communication with the  
blob that does all the heavy lifting, like the ATI/AMD drivers.
It stems from the top. Torvalds thinks he is still a student; his foul words  
on the mailing lists are extremely unprofessional, and at the very least  
astonishingly impolite, and it made some contributors quit.

At least we have Linux-libre though. One cannot doubt that the Linux kernel  
is a very impressive project and has been great for spreading free software.