On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 02:23:54PM +0100, Martin Waitz wrote: > I have a PCMCIA card that lost its flash memory. > So suddenly its driver became non-free?
Only if all such cards have lost their flash memory, which is improbable. As long as some cards exist with a working flash, the driver is useful without having to lug along non-free firmware. (There's a corner case: hardware which always ships with a firmware which does not work with the driver, and can be flashed by the user with firmware that does. This doesn't seem any less a dependency than when the driver itself has to load it; the only people the driver works for is those who have already manually installed the non-free data. I havn't thought too much about this case.) > What about all those drivers for hardware that I don't own? > They don't work for me, yet I won't flag them as non-free. The question is whether it works for somebody, not whether it works for you. > Sending firmware to the device is not that different to sending some > magic initialization commands. Firmware should be treated as exactly > that: magic initialization data for the device. "Magic initialization commands" are probably not copyrightable, so they're free; they're part of the driver, and cause no problems for anyone[1]. Firmware is (generally) copyrightable, and the license on the firmware affects the usability of the device and its driver to users. [1] there are some corner cases (of what seems to me to be copyright abuse), eg. in the AIM client case, but that's a very different scenario and should be treated independently. -- Glenn Maynard