Re: LCC and blobs
Anthony DeRobertis <anthony@derobert.net> writes:
> Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
>> That's not software. That's firmware, at best -- you can look at it
>> as software, but then you don't get to distribute any drivers. It is
>> also internally consistent to think of chips as hardware and
>> distribute drivers appropriately. It is never consistent to think of
>> files on disk as anything but software.
>
> Hmmm, I have a CF card. Upon it are files, and in every meaningful way
> it is a disk. Therefor, that data is software.
>
> Yet, CF is actually chips --- often the same chips as used to hold
> firmware distributed with hardware. Thus, it's all hardware.
Sure. It's on a medium for software exchange, thus it's software. If
it were an integral component of a device, it'd be hardware. I've
never been confused when looking at such things; the closest case I've
found to confusing is the MP3 player, which has its OS on disk. I'm
inclined to say that it's software to the MP3 player, an architecture
which Debian does not support. It's hardware, a drive, to the
(Intel?) Debian-supported PC to which it's connected.
-Brian
--
Brian Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
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