Hi, On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 12:36:54PM +0100, Marc Haber wrote: > On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 01:50:40AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > To paraphrase: Those who give up essential freedoms for > > temporary convenience and popularity deserve neither. > This is something we need to agree to disagree on. There are people > who still focus on "The Universal Operating System", and who are > willing to make compromises in freedom without being willing to make a > totally non-free OS. System-on-a-Chip designs which already provide the necessary interfaces have become the cheapest option in hardware design, and the most robust way to drive this hardware is indeed to load the firmware at startup because it brings the "hardware" into a known state. The firmware problem will never go away, because there is always new hardware being built. For some chips (e.g. the FX2 USB controllers), there is a chance that we might get free firmware for certain device classes soonish, since these are well documented, but until that happens, I think seeing the interface presented by the firmware as the "hardware" interface and requiring that all drivers talking to this interface be free software is enough for us. Simon
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