Comment by tmtvl
4 months ago
Are you hoping the Free Software Foundation _doesn't_ prioritize Free Software? For people who are okay with random bits of proprietary software doing who-knows-what on their devices there are various alternatives already.
To me:
Open Source Firmware signed by OS > Firmware blob signed by device manufacturer > Firmware blob hardcoded by device Manufacturer
The FSF treats hardcoded firmware blobs as "free" and updatable firmware blobs as nonfree despite there not being a big difference between them in practice. And practical differences like being able to fix security issues benefits users.
> And practical differences like being able to fix security issues benefits users.
More often than not these updates are not actually benefits to the users.
Can you provide such an example? Because of bugs in the new version? A lot of the time old versions can still be loaded.
7 replies →
Thank you for clearing that up, I clearly misread that completely.
I initially made the same misread that you did...
The OP's point is, having the firmware permanently burnt-in on a ROM chip vs loaded as a binary blob via a driver doesn't change the "non-free"-ness of the firmware itself.
So opting for hardware which has a "fully-open-source" driver, but runs a binary blob encoded into the hardware, doesn't make the system fully open.
It's a take for a more Free system, not for accepting binary blobs.
(Or I guess for acknowledging that if you're willing to allow binary blobs stored in hardware, then dynamically-loaded binary blobs doesn't change the "free"-ness.)
That's not even close to what they said.
They're saying approval of any who-knows-what code shouldn't be decided based on how it's loaded.