On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 12:19:44AM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 12:56:43PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > > Thomas, please tell me, what is the licencing situation of the bios you > > run ? And if your motherboard has some defect, are you able to look at > > the source code for the chipset, and modify it, or possibly make sure > > there is not some unwanted trojan included there ? > > Although it's not important I will point out that the chipset isn't > software but rather an ASIC, and modifying it is a bit more involved > than recompiling! It does actually have source code but it's no more
Yeah, sure, which is more reason for making sure we will not compromise ourself with vendors of binary-only drivers. > reasonable to demand the source code for your chipset than for your > Pentium 4 or Athlon XP processor. But then you may think it's quite > reasonable to demand the source code for both... And, don't you think the proprietary vendors did not use exactly this rethoric 10, 20 years ago ? Do you not think that this is exactly the same thing Microsoft would tell you today if you asked them about source code ? I do believe there are free processor alternatives out there, like the opensparc one for example. There is also a free hardware community out there, as well as free firmware people, but these are areas debian as whole, and the non-free proponent in particular, have largely been ignoring. > Actually said source code would probably be quite useful from an > educational POV. Yeah, among other. It may also be our only chance once the privacy-limiting DRM laws become stronger and more enforced. Friendly, Sven Luther
