I think you've missed that I've been discussing this in the manner of
a Medical Examiner dictating the details of the corpse she's
dissecting. Like many Brit's I leave editorial to peoples' own
intelligence, they can easily presume from me being an Associate
Member here and FSF I am committed to free software ideals.
While I'm in agreement with the broad sweep of what you say, and
specifically that non-free blobs are not to be used (I'm using
Trisquel so that's obvious) and simply GPLing the code that uses it
is a wrongness, it simply is the case that the drivers with GPL
licensed blobs are legally free. Just a poorer kind of free which
requires reverse engineering work to turn into a good type of free.
But then we are a free software community, so as RMS has said let's
not limit ourselves to picking low hanging fruit, rather let's
encourage someone with one of these card to RE the firmware. Which
is where I came in in one of these RALink threads. Until it is REd
and we have source then Trisquel will not include it because it is
merely a technical kind of free and I endorsed that policy.
The terms free and non-free seem to lead people into the known human
psychological weakness of dichotomous thinking. Aka black and white
thinking. Complete software freedom being possible on ones desktop,
laptop and some routers helps this along a bit. We should remember
that the objective is absolute software freedom, where it is mandated
by law globally. Until that day (which we won't live to see) then
best practice is to maximise ones software freedom in _all_ devices,
which means its shades of grey and personal judgements - not a
duality. So yes we can judge if something is fully free and always
seek that, but regrettably at present like these blobs there are
cases which are a different grade of free.
Note that here in the EU it is illegal to RE to replace (but not to
inter-operate). However, a GPL blob should logically be REable
because it's simply changing the form of something which is already
free and so the licensing explicitly allows that (IANAL). So there
is potential benefit in GPL blobs over non-free license blobs even
though both are an unpleasant and unnecessary hindrance.
I haven't done any RE since my 8-bit days, but with my ISP replacing
my router for free in preparation for fibre this last contract
renewal I have my old one set aside to practice on and have bought a
cheap USB JTAG for the job. Obviously I've lot a to catch up on
because I've not done that much coding in the past decade and no
embedded since 1998. My memory of 8-bit RE is that it was more
laborious and time consuming than properly difficult. As RMS once
said there are few things software which actually qualify as
difficult (c/w some math, physics, & medicine e.g.).
Leny
