Re: Leverage in licensing discussions

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Johannes Wiedersich <johannes@physik.blm.tu-muenchen.de> writes:

> Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > This reasoning, as any security-by-obscurity one, is completely
> > flawed. As long as the firmware is distributed separately, you can
> > modify it, whether it is open source or not. Not having the source
> > never prevented people from making modifications.
> 
> Even if it is no guarantee for prevention of modifications, it makes
> those much more difficult.

Much more difficult than what? One of the main arguments we've seen
presented in the past month is that many of these firmware blobs *have
no other form*, and modifications are *primarily* made to the binary
blob, even by the vendor.

Ergo, for these cases, any recipient of the binary blob is equally
capable of modifying and redistributing whether the blob is free
software or not.

-- 
 \         “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the |
  `\        death your right to mis-attribute this quote to Voltaire.” |
_o__)                     —Avram Grumer, rec.arts.sf.written, May 2000 |
Ben Finney