| The distinction is still arbitrary even if you omit the hardware compromise aspect. I mean, let's go back to that quote about assembler from Theo: http://web.archive.org/web/20060603230017/http://kerneltrap.... — «Of course, also note that we don't want to become Hermes (the architecture of the Lucent/Prism/Symbol chip) assembly language programmers... we have more than enough to do. Just a specific example. Please, people, don't load us up with more tasks ;)» (NB: Theo's talking about the wi(4) firmware, see http://mdoc.su/-/wi.4 .) DDG for "Stallman microwave" returns this page and this quote: http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html — «As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer.» Now, what does that firmware for wi(4) actually even does? How's it different from the hardware itself? What sort of language is it written in? I'm mean, I'm a kernel developer here, I've hacked drivers and subsystems because they weren't working properly, but are you seriously going to argue here that actually updating this firmware is any more common than updating the software of the microwave? I mean, let's take a look and find out. NetBSD appears to have it all in a single dir over at http://bxr.su/n/sys/dev/microcode/wi/ — clicking on any individual file, then the CVSweb link, reveals that it's been committed 15 to 17 years ago and not once updated (apart from the whitespace in the .h header file). Searching for these files in OpenBSD reveals the same situation — http://bxr.su/o/sys/dev/microcode/symbol/ . So, basically, the manufacturer decided to save a few cents by omitting a ROM component on their cards; requiring you to bootstrap the device by giving it its firmware on each boot. How's that any different from the situation where the ROM chip is fixed from the factory? As a user and kernel developer, I don't really see a difference. Would it be nice if the firmware is OSS? I mean, sure, but it's written in a proprietary language anyways, for proprietary hardware, and it's really much more part of the hardware than it is of the software or the OS, and there's better battles to fight here than getting this sort of useless thing FLOSS'ed. In fact, those 12-hour clocks on most microwaves are really annoying, and there's never an option to fix it. It should be possible to get the source code for all those microwaves to fix them to use 24-h time; I'd much rather campaign for that than for making wi(4)'s firmware OSS. |