RE: Keyspan Firmware fun
> There are lots of firmware images in your computer that don't have a
> OpenSource license on them, just that now some of these devices
> require the host to send the image to them before they can work
> properly.
certainly... host adapters, hard drives, motherboards, video cards, storage
devices, digital cameras, etc. all have firmware that most likely contains a
lot of juicy information about the hardware that vendors may want to keep
secret. and we should accommodate for that - it's not like it's of much use
to us anyway, and requiring our users download firmware and recompile kernel
[module]s is hardly improving the user experience. it seems linus and
friends are accommodating for their needs by terming it 'mere aggregation' -
whether or not this is a valid assertion i don't know - i doubt it's
something that's ever been tested (although it certainly is the easy way
out). yes it's linked in, but not in the same way a library is (ie it's more
like an embedded string than a chunk of code... it does, after all, run on
the device itself and not the main CPU), so one could argue that its license
can be independent.
rather than whinge about the licenses and turn away vendors who are trying
to be useful, why not solve the problem? and no, forcing hardware vendors to
provide open source code is not the answer - most will probably just
withdraw support, saving it for some other alternative, less picky operating
system (like windows).
with drivers (esp usb) supporting multiple devices there comes a point where
compiling in the firmware is cumbersome (have to recompile to upgrade a
single device). so why not store the firmware in separate files, which are
in turn packaged separately and stored in a separate non-free section of the
kernel archive? identify the device, look for the firmware, and if it's not
there then complain? the firmware itself could be a separate download
(notice you no longer need to recompile), or better yet, a non-free package.
whether this happens in the kernel module itself or a userland daemon i
guess doesn't really matter, although a file system structure that handles
not only usb, but scsi, storage devices, etc. as well would be a good idea.
thanks hugh/greg for your comments,
- samj
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