Peter Van Eynde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: >> No; the hardware is damaged. No driver can drive that. The driver >> you have is a driver for Foomatic Quxer cards. You don't have a >> Foomatix Quxer; you have a broken pile of junk. > > So here you argue that because the firmware is gone the hardware is > broken, correct?
No, I argue that because you've pried chips off the board, the hardware is broken. >> ... It's clearly software, and the driver clearly has a dependency on it. > > And now you consider it software just because the method of storage is > different? How can the nature of the bytes change because they are > stored on a disk? The nature of the bytes do not change. But my name, distributed in a Debian package, is software. My name, written in letters of granite thirty feet high, is not. How can the nature of the data change? Architectural plans for a house, shipped in a Debian package, are software. An actual house embodying those plans is not software. But gosh, the nature changes! > If the driver need to load the firmware or just needs to enable it is > the same thing. Just think of the enable sequence as highly compressed > firmware > :-). The simplest and most important difference is that we know anyone with a functioning device has the on-chip firmware. He often can't redistribute the on-disk firmware to somebody else if he sells the device, as its licence prohibits this. > So the driver has a dependency on the firmware, even if it is in the > device itself. So we have to move all drivers that use devices with > build-in firmware to contrib. > > That or we see that the firmware is actually part of the hardware and > that uploading is just a natural thing a driver should do. Some firmware is part of the hardware. Some isn't. It's easy to tell -- either it's in the hardware or it isn't. Of course, the name "firmware" should make it clear that this is an often ambiguous line. But this does seem to be a good practical place: can anybody with the device and the driver use it? Or are there some people who even with a functioning, complete device and a driver who can't get it to work? > The fact that most firmware cannot be redistributed or does not come > as source just selects what we can ship or have to ask the user to > provide. > >> Since in the case of firmware on disk we can't reliably get the >> firmware to users *anyway*, utility's not atainable and we should keep >> our principles of freedom. > > I see no limitation of my freedom in using firmware. Please tell me > how I am limited in my freedom. If I wanted a open source firmware I > could buy a device with open firmware, Then Windows isn't proprietary either. Sigh. -Brian -- Brian Sniffen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
