Loïc Minier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, Oct 27, 2008, Jeff Carr wrote: > > have little flash chips holding these bits all over in your > > machine now. You just don't know it. And now, because someone is > > giving you the luxury of actually loading them via software (with > > gpl software no less) you seem to be all ticked off. > > Right; I share your concerns with the new burden Debian is > attaching to itself when requiring the loadable firmwares to be > free.
The requirement for the contents of Debian to be free is not a new burden. It's spelled out in the Social Contract; the founders and drafters of that document are clear that the intention was always for all of Debian to be free, not just some parts of Debian. What's relatively new is the realisation that some of those parts (such as firmware) have a programmatic function but can, in some cases, have *no* better form for making modifications than the binary blob itself. At least, that's my understanding of some of the use cases presented here: that even the vendors of those blobs routinely modify the binary blob directly to generate a new version of it, much like bit-manipulating a machine-code executable and running it. As strange as it may seem to my mind used to the roomy expanses and flexibility to be found in a motherboard CPU, it may be an optimal way to work when the processor in question barely has room in its program memory or instruction set for the functional blob, and no extra room for even embedded diagnostic tools, let alone debuggers or symbol tables. I don't know that to be the case, but I'm not going to reject the possibility only because it's difficult for me personally to imagine. > I fear it's not an easy task to delimit which (sub-)system we > require to be free though. I'd love it if someone could come up > with some sane wording for it. I think the Social Contract makes it fairly clear that all of the Debian operating system is promised to be free. I don't see a compelling reason to allow breaches of that promise to be rationalised away by differences in functional classification of the works. > How do others feel about this? Is there any contamination of the > firmwares when shipped in a free OS which is not possible to > prevent? My opinion is that recipients of Debian should have unfettered access to exercise the freedoms of running/performance, inspection, modification, and redistribution of the entirety of Debian, using nothing but operating system tools that are similarly unfettered and hardware that's commonly used for such activities. That means: free access to exactly the same form of the work that the vendor might use to make modification to any part of the operating system, be it the language instructions and APIs that gets rendered to a machine code program, or the full-layered vector document that gets rendered to a PNG file, or the reStructuredText document and style sheets that get rendered to a PDF file, or the firmware blob that gets manipulated as-is. Whatever the vendor can do to the work in order to inspect, modify, and redistribute it, a Debian recipient equipped with suitable generic hardware can expect to have free reign to do the same. It's clear that not every recipient of Debian will have access to the hardware nor expertise necessary to develop useful modifications to a GPU-targetted instruction blob, just as not everyone has a digital camera for capturing high-resolution photographic data. But every Debian recipient can certainly expect to be free to redistribute Debian to someone arbitrary party (who is not necessarily the vendor) who *does* have such hardware and expertise, and for that party to be free to apply requested modifications and redistribute the work back to them, *without* anyone in that chain needing extra permissions and *without* access to any specific extra data, vendor-specific programs, or other non-free software. If the above isn't the case for any part of Debian, I consider that a breach of the Social Contract, to be considered a serious bug and fixed appropriately by ceasing redistribution of that work in Debian until it's fixed, and (ideally) fixing it so the work can again be included in Debian. -- \ “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be | `\ made in a very narrow field.” —Niels Bohr | _o__) | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
