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Re: more evil firmwares found



On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 12:40:44AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Apr 21, Evan Prodromou <evan@debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > Well, I think that's a mistake. At the very least, we should contact
> > the firmware developers telling them why the stuff's coming out of
> > Debian, and what they can do to get it back in.
> "Nothing", in most cases.

Or they might laugh at the conclusions we have jumped to.  Not all
binary blobs that get uploaded to hardware are firmware or microcode.
That underlying assumption, that such blobs are software, is what is
driving the removal of freely-licensed binary-blobs-without-source
pursuant to the DFSG.

I don't think this assumption is particularly wise, but it looks like
enough people are motivated to do the work to move binary-blob-loading
into userspace.  So I won't argue against it, at least until I find one
day that the microcode has been removed from the mga driver and the
userspace loaders at that date are either nonfunctional or inconvenient.

-- 
Ryan Underwood, <nemesis@icequake.net>

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