LWN headline: Blame Fedora = High Praise

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May  1, 2007, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:

> Hmmm. I'd really like to see an entirely free spin of Fedora that
> doesn't include firmware as separate packages or in the kernel.

+1

> As the latter is not possible easily yet

Why not?  AFAIK gNewSense folks published their tool to extract the
all non-Free firmware from the kernel.

> it doesn't make much sense starting to work on it yet.

But does it make sense to add more of a bad thing just because we
think we can't easily get rid of the bad things we already have?

> But my logic fails to follow this:

> Seperate firmware			-> 	unacceptable
> Firmware that's part of the kernel	-> 	acceptable

That's not my reasoning.  My reasoning is:

Firmware that's part of the kernel => bad, should eventually try to
get rid of it	

Separate firmware => bad, should keep on avoiding

> If firmware is considered non-Free then *for my logic* it should be
> considered non-Free wherever it located/part of.

Agreed.

> In other words: As long as Fedora has firmware files as part of the
> kernel it's IMHO not much worse if we have some firmware bits in
> userland, too.

"Not much worse" is the operative keyword here.  It's worse, just not
much.  It's one more step down a slippery slope.

> And heck, that's probably better for everyone -- otherwise people or
> vendors might start putting even more firmware files into the kernel
> somehow.

And then, by making it easy for people to tolerate this kind of abuse,
we're helping people reject such vendors how?  And we're helping these
vendors see they ought to respect people how?

It seems to me that, by making it easier for people to use such
devices, we're telling people "hey, look, look how good this is for
you", and we're telling vendors "keep that coming, we'll take it".

While the message we should be sending is "Thanks, but no, thanks!"

I think it's not too hard to see where it leads to take a little step
at a time down the "not much worse" slope.  It won't get us where we
state we want to be.  It will take us farther and farther from it, and
it will be harder to get back what we already had.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}