On Tue, Oct 21, 2008, Romain Beauxis wrote: > If I recall well, one of the origin of the GNU fondation was the fact that > having free drivers alowed one to actually *fix* issues he may have with his > *own* hardware. Then, the very same reasoning can apply to binary firmware.
Hardware can suffer from bugs which you can not fix; I'm happy to put firmware in the same bucket as long as there is a clear interface on which I can rely to get it to work most of the time. I'm using Google daily, but I don't have the source code that's running on their servers. I don't mind shipping a firmware blob just like I don't mind having to press the power button to boot my laptop. If it's a prerequirement to get the hardware to work with free drivers, and we have the rights to redistribute this blob, I see no problem. > So, yes this is a brand new issue, that comes from the new way of designing > hardware. But that doesn't mean we should give up and remain behind the line > that was drawn 20 (or so) years ago. We now should also ask for open source > firmware for the very same reason that this huge effort toward free drivers > was done. If we did it for drivers, there's no reason we can't suceed for > firmwares. Happy if such a project is started outside of Debian, or within Debian, but not if it affects all current Debian users right now. -- Loïc Minier -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
