Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes: > Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:
>> I believe that's because you are limiting the definition of "firmware" >> to define most of the firmware in the system to not be firmware, in >> ways that I find indefensible, so that you can make this claim. > Ok, now this become a bit more clear to me. It seems there are two > things at play here: > 1) Hardware-bound firmware shipped with the physical hardware. > 2) Supplied firmware provided to the hardware by the operating system. > If I understand you correctly, you believe these two are the same thing, > and you are using the term "firmware" to refer to both and, further, > that you believe it is not possible to separate these two kind of > firmwares. Correct, because both methods of shipping the firmware have exactly the same effect on the user's freedom, which is the thing that matters here. The point of the free software movement, and presumably also the free hardware movement, is the user's freedom to control their own computing. This is the lens through which one therefore must analyze this in a discussion in a free software context. > If so, I think we found some fundamental aspect to disagree on. Well, it took years and multiple threads with you to get the point across, but better late than never, I guess? > To me this is comparable to saying "owning music on a CD" or "streaming > music from a service" is the same, I have no idea why you would say this. In the typical situation with both firmware cases, the user is in physical possession of the hardware and the firmware, but cannot modify the firmware or exercise the other standard free software freedoms. This is precisely the problem with non-free software in general. In one case, the firmware is shipped separately, but this makes no more practical difference than whether the computer came in one or two boxes. There is no "streaming" involved in the general firmware problem. (There are probably some devices with some sort of call-home or remote-disable capabilities, but that's an entirely different problem than what we're talking about here.) > It doesn't seem reasonable to blame the lack of adequate hardware on > software people. That ought to be the responsibility of hardware > people, and that's where help is needed. I'm not blaming anyone for anything. (Well, I'm blaming the hardware companies for using non-free firmware, but I don't think we disagree about that.) I am pointing out that removing a user's ability to update their non-free firmware does not in any way give that user more freedom. It does the exact opposite. The goal of the free software movement should be to provide that user with the full source code to all of their firmware and enable them to change it in any way that they want. We cannot currently do that for basically all commerically available hardware, which is sad. The best that we can do is offer them the ability to manage the non-free software their system is crippled with, so at least they can exercise what control they have to choose whether and when to change the versions of that loaded non-free firmware. This is not true software freedom, but it's *more* freedom than freezing the firmware at whatever copies are currently loaded into the hardware. This should be obvious: the user has a few choices instead of no choices. This of course also provides some concrete practical advantages to the user, such as being able to install security updates from the non-free software vendor if they choose to do so. It also means that we archive the historical updates independent of the vendor, so users can still obtain what was previously available for their devices even if the hardware manufacturer has disappeared or has pulled older versions, perhaps because they allow the user more control and freedom than the manufacturer had wanted. That those updates are also non-free sucks, but the role Debian is serving here is to provide the user with as many choices as we can, given the regrettable situation. The approach that you are describing as somehow more free removes the support to the user for exercising those choices in return for... well, making you personally feel better? I'm not trying to be flippant here; I really can't see any benefit to the user whatsoever in your approach other than that it somehow satisfies some bizarre ideological purity test that doesn't practically help the user in any way. > Hardware freedom concerns has to be resolved by the hardware community, > it cannot be solved software people. Right. So in the meantime, as we all try to navigate the imperfect world we are currently living in, we should provide our users with the absolute maximum amount of freedom that we can. Because our priority is the freedom of our users. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
