> There are lots of firmware images in your computer that don't have a > OpenSource license on them, just that now some of these devices > require the host to send the image to them before they can work > properly.
certainly... host adapters, hard drives, motherboards, video cards, storage devices, digital cameras, etc. all have firmware that most likely contains a lot of juicy information about the hardware that vendors may want to keep secret. and we should accommodate for that - it's not like it's of much use to us anyway, and requiring our users download firmware and recompile kernel [module]s is hardly improving the user experience. it seems linus and friends are accommodating for their needs by terming it 'mere aggregation' - whether or not this is a valid assertion i don't know - i doubt it's something that's ever been tested (although it certainly is the easy way out). yes it's linked in, but not in the same way a library is (ie it's more like an embedded string than a chunk of code... it does, after all, run on the device itself and not the main CPU), so one could argue that its license can be independent. rather than whinge about the licenses and turn away vendors who are trying to be useful, why not solve the problem? and no, forcing hardware vendors to provide open source code is not the answer - most will probably just withdraw support, saving it for some other alternative, less picky operating system (like windows). with drivers (esp usb) supporting multiple devices there comes a point where compiling in the firmware is cumbersome (have to recompile to upgrade a single device). so why not store the firmware in separate files, which are in turn packaged separately and stored in a separate non-free section of the kernel archive? identify the device, look for the firmware, and if it's not there then complain? the firmware itself could be a separate download (notice you no longer need to recompile), or better yet, a non-free package. whether this happens in the kernel module itself or a userland daemon i guess doesn't really matter, although a file system structure that handles not only usb, but scsi, storage devices, etc. as well would be a good idea. thanks hugh/greg for your comments, - samj
