Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
No; the hardware is damaged. No driver can drive that. The driver you have is a driver for Foomatic Quxer cards. You don't have a Foomatix Quxer; you have a broken pile of junk.
So here you argue that because the firmware is gone the hardware is broken, correct?
... It's clearly software, and the driver clearly has a dependency on it.
And now you consider it software just because the method of storage is different? How can the nature of the bytes change because they are stored on a disk?
If the driver need to load the firmware or just needs to enable it is the same thing. Just think of the enable sequence as highly compressed firmware
:-).So the driver has a dependency on the firmware, even if it is in the device itself. So we have to move all drivers that use devices with build-in firmware to contrib.
That or we see that the firmware is actually part of the hardware and that uploading is just a natural thing a driver should do. The fact that most firmware cannot be redistributed or does not come as source just selects what we can ship or have to ask the user to provide.
Since in the case of firmware on disk we can't reliably get the firmware to users *anyway*, utility's not atainable and we should keep our principles of freedom.
I see no limitation of my freedom in using firmware. Please tell me how I am limited in my freedom. If I wanted a open source firmware I could buy a device with open firmware,
Groetjes, Peter