Bruce Perens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Certainly there are AVR and ARM chips that do glue-less downloading from > serial FLASH chips at boot time. Atmel sells them, among others. > Reprogramming of the FLASH is done via JPEG and not under the embedded > processor's control.
Bruce, as far as I can tell, you're claiming that it's better for vendors to put code in flash because that way Debian doesn't have to worry about the non-freeness of it. While I can see ways in which that is true, I don't believe it /should/ be true. Non-free code in flash is no more or less a problem than non-free code on disk. We shouldn't be encouraging manufacturers to make their products more expensive by putting it in flash - we should be encouraging manufacturers to open the specifications so we can implement free versions, or encouraging them to open the firmware in its entirity. One of these choices does nothing to advance freedom. The other does. If anything, we should be happy that manufacturers /are/ starting to move away from flash - it makes it clearer that there's a freedom issue that we're not at liberty to ignore. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]