Re: non-free firmware: driver in main or contrib?
Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> writes:
> On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 20:36 -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
>> It's a perfectly reasonable means to discriminate. One is *in the
>> hardware*. If I buy a widget, I don't care whether it uses firmware
>> in an eeprom or a well-trained gerbil. It's a box. Software on my
>> CPU is different.
>
> The firmware is never executed on your CPU.
The driver is. Look, there are two circumstances here:
* If the firmware's on an eeprom, I could build another device just
like that one but implemented with clever rodents instead. And the
driver would still work.
* If the firmware's a loaded bitstring, I can't build another device
unless it also emulates execution of the firmware -- because
somebody might change the firmware, and expect changed functionality.
In other words, if the firmware's in a box we can treat the whole box
as a hardware machine. If the firmware's an exposed software blob, we
have to treat it like one and recognize the dependencies.
-Brian
--
Brian Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
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