[Mageia-dev] Non-free firmwares in installer

Sat Mar 26 14:05:41 CET 2011

Op zaterdag 26 maart 2011 13:19:10 schreef Michael scherer:
+> 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.
+
+i agree that free software is important, but if it's a blob without released 
+source code but with BSD license, i really don't see the problem. perhaps 
+someone could just ask the people who licensed it, for the source code...? but 
+this is a thing to do for FSF, not mageia. that is my point.
+
+it doesn't mean i don't agree with what those people are doing, they should 
+release it with it. But that still doesn't make it the job of Mageia to fix 
+that.
+