On Sat, Jan 07, 2017 at 12:22:55AM +0100, Martin Hanson wrote: > I have misunderstood the purpose and use of the term "free" of OpenBSD > then. > > "OpenBSD strives to provide code that can be freely used, copied, modified, > and distributed by anyone and for any purpose", apparently there exists > exceptions to this then. > > Of course it doesn't say anything like, "OpenBSD strives to ONLY provide.."
I agree with Theo. Don't buy hardware you don't like. The OpenBSD project does not develop hardware or firmware. Please complain to the vendors who build this shit instead of complaining to us. We are just trying to keep our OS running on whatever hardware we can actually support with reasonable effort. There is a lot more valuable work being done within OpenBSD than just hardware support, and yet all that other work would not happen without hardware support. Meanwhile on Debian people are happily running "free" drivers which aren't blobs but instead are an unmaintainable mess such as this: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/net/wireless/broadcom/brcm80211/brcmsmac/phy/phy_n.c Nobody outside of Broadcom can reasonably maintain this obfuscated C code because nobody outside of Broadcom has hardware docs. Yet Linux imports it since they apparently just let vendors commit whatever code to their tree. This driver even has the right license but we still can't port this because it would be impractical for us to maintain. This single source file is larger than all of the existing wireless code in OpenBSD. So we don't support current Broadcom wifi devices even though they don't need any firmware! Blobs exist because vendors try to keep secrets, and evidently they even keep secrets when they "voluntarily" give code to Linux under BSD licence. What is really needed is a cultural shift towards open collaboration and free (in all meanings) hardware documentation. The rest will follow.
