Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> writes: > No distruption for existing systems, satisfies those concerned about > accidentally installing "real" software (as much as the notion of > executable code running on another processor in your machine, or even > deeper inside the same processor, being less of software, is ridiculous > to me).
It's not necessarily that it's less of software, but that the licensing issues are very unlikely to be blockers for how the software is used (hopefully we wouldn't even package firmware that put restrictions on how people use their computer, and that's not at all a standard thing to see in such licenses). That makes some of the practical issues of non-free software less likely to apply, such as whether it would compromise the free software status of some related project when looking for solutions to a particular problem. Also, while this is certainly debatable, I do feel like firmware is farther down the "supply chain" of computing and the free software campaign, on a practical level, has been pushing software freedom slowly farther and farther down the supply chain. At the start of free software, the only option was around end-user-installed supplemental software. Then we got free operating systems, but things like BIOS were uniformly non-free. Now we're starting to take a serious look at free firmware, but there's almost nothing in the way of free processor microcode (particularly for mass-market general-purpose non-embedded computing). We'd like to get all the way to free software for everything, but we've always had to make compromises around the pieces for which there isn't (yet) a free software alternative, until we've managed to build those alternatives. Software tightly linked to hardware is inherently harder because it's more difficult, as a community, to make our own hardware than it is to make our own "pure" software. It makes sense to me that it's taking longer and we have to make practical compromises for longer than we do for non-hardware-linked software. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
