Hi On Freitag, 24. April 2009, Ben Finney wrote: > Adeodato Simó <[email protected]> writes: > > > To an hypothetical person that would deeply care about not running > > non-free software, does that provide any real gain/benefit/improvement > > over running a kernel full of request_firmware() calls, and never > > installing a firmware package from non-free in their systems? Honest > > question. > > Jokes about “sin” aside: It's a whole lot easier to *discover* such > non-free pieces if one can be confident that, even if installed by > mistake, they will fail to load. > > Think of it as “defense in depth”, ensuring that there is more than > one barrier to undesirable elements.
Just as a side note, there are a number of FOSS firmwares requiring
request_firmware() available, voiding this argument. Be it Robert Millan's
"a56" [1] package for the Motorola DSP56001 DSPs or OpenFWWF [2] (#513974,
as it depends on kernel 2.6.30 (ideally 2.6.31) [3], I haven't pushed for
it yet, but it works well) as a GPL2 licensed free firmware for a number of
Broadcom 802.11b/g wlan cards. Similar approaches to create free firmware
replacements have (had?) also been started for prism54/ p54 wlan cards,
although I'm not aware of its status.
Regards
Stefan Lippers-Hollmann
[1] http://packages.debian.org/a56
[2] http://www.ing.unibs.it/openfwwf/
http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/fullstory/b43-asm/trunk/ (#513973)
http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/fullstory/openfwwf/trunk/
[3]
http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/fullstory/openfwwf/trunk/debian/README.Debian
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