[sramsay]

"We cannot effectively study, understand, debug, or improve, the underlying operating system if it is non-free. We actively work with the source code for the systems on which we depend, and we are not interested in supporting any platforms for which this is not possible."

I understand that you don't like it, but how do you come to regard a statement like this as "arbitrary?" It's exclusive, for sure. "Purity test" is one way to characterize it. But do you really think that statements like this are just the product of individual caprice? That it's not someone's attempt at a principled intervention, but just an "attitude?"

[PhilipRoman]

Ouch, I hadn't really considered it before but that quote deeply resonates with me. The experience of trying to debug windows wifi system is day and night compared to wpa_supplicant/mac80211.

[samatman]

You're right, it isn't arbitrary. I removed that word from the post and edited it to express my opinion more clearly.

[apantel]

I was going to post the same quote. If you have no visibility into the layer you depend on, you really can’t reason about it or write optimized code for it.

The Hares are saying they require that, which I totally understand and respect.