On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 07:07 -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: > Matthew Garrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > On the other hand, if it's clearly software when it's on CD then it's > > clearly software when it's on eeprom. > > False. That's why we call it firmware, not just "software living on a > device". > It's an implementation detail of the hardware that they happen to have > shipped a microprocessor and a hardwired program. If the program had > been burned into a circuit in an FPGA, would you still call it > software? Brian, we are talking about identical code. Software doesn't stop being software if it's burned into a ROM instead of being supplied with the OS. An FPGA is a more interesting issue - would you define a set of verilog code as software if it's supplied on disk? > If it's a single-use PROM, is it still software? If we would want the source code to it if we shipped the contents, then yes, it's software. > >From the point of view of the driver, the device is just a device. It > gets... driven. That's it. No need to consider the things inside and > force decisions about software or not onto them. I want a world in which all code run on a system is free, no matter whether that code is executed by the host processor or something on a card. I see no reason for us to consider non-free software more "legitimate" purely because it's on a chip rather than on a hard drive. As a result, I consider all arguments that apply to code on hard drives to apply equally well to code on chips. > Anything the user's being told to copy to /usr/local/something, on the > other hand, is clearly software. You appear to be claiming that identical code is firmware if it's on a chip and software if it's on a CD, and that we should apply different standards to each situation. I'm claiming that it's always software, and we should apply the same standards to it in all cases. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
