Adam Bolte <abolte@systemsaviour.com> writes:
If my above assumptions are correct, why treat graphics driver firmware specially? I'm certainly not saying it's wrong to demand free firmware, however I'm curious why some firmware is treated differently. Is it because one lives in your filesystem on your HDD, but the other is stored in an EEPROM (and if so, why does this matter)?
Yes, for me, that's it exactly. I distinguish between devices that require non-free firmware to be uploaded each time I turn them on and devices that have firmware inside but don't require me to touch it. It's important to me to draw clear lines between the free and the non-free software. I don't want my operating system project to have to distribute non-free software, because fully-free operating systems are so much more powerful as an advocacy tool. That's why I use Trisquel; because it makes no exceptions. Beyond that, I also think it's important that we have free firmware for devices that come with it embedded such as motherboards and hard drives). These are a smaller violation of freedom though, and cleanly segmented from operating system distributions. Right now I prefer instead to focus on the bigger problems for freedom such as Skype and Adobe Flash. Ben