[Mageia-dev] Non-free firmwares in installer

Sat Mar 26 13:19:10 CET 2011

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 09:33:04AM +0100, Tux99 wrote:
+> 
+> 
+> Quote: andr55 wrote on Fri, 25 March 2011 01:29
+> 
+> > My though was essentially that firmware is so close to hardware that
+> > its 
+> > actual free/non-free status shouldn't apply - we should treat it like 
+> > (almost) part of the hardware.
+> 
+> I agree with that. After all nobody (apart from R. Stallmann) questions the
+> fact that the BIOS of their PC is non-free or all the other firmware or
+> microcode on various chips on the motherboard and on expansion cards and
+> peripherals.
+
+In fact, this bother a lot of people :
+
+People who write coreboot for example ( http://www.coreboot.org ). The project started
+because someone wanted to be sure that his cluster didn't have bios problem. It is a daunting
+task to hit any key on 1000 servers, especially if none of them have a keyboard.
+
+People who just want to know how the pc work, for example, students in low level system.
+Lack of source doesn't really help to understand and learn, at least for the average
+people.
+
+People who maybe want to understand why the driver they wrote broke with firmware update 
+( happened on some Apple laptop because apple updated something that broke video driver on linux ).
+Or why it work with some card and not some other, since they have a different firmware.
+
+People who wonder if their TPM chips is really under their control or not. Maybe a bunch of 
+loonies. Maybe they are just ex sony customers screwed by their vendor, or people
+who had 1984 on their Kindle before Amazon removed it.
+
+Or simply people that want to know what was fixed for their hardware. 
+( https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F14/FEDORA-2010-18594 ). Or just
+want to avoid security issues ( https://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/track/Hacking/4174.en.html ).
+Or avoid waiting 5 minutes delay when booting a server for likely no good reason.
+
+Or people that have trouble because the lack of free software in their area
+prevent them from doing their work as security researcher, as demonstrated by
+the project Osmocombb ( http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/ ).
+
+But, yes maybe if we remove some security researchers, some cluster admins, 
+some people that would prefer to not be screwed by vendor, some kernel developpers, 
+some impatient sysadmins, some students, some coders and RMS, there is no one who 
+question it.
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+