| Marco d'Itri 2005-03-27, 7:47 am |
| On Mar 27, Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net> wrote:
> I don't need to. What we are lacking is not those arguments, but the
> key missing pieces: what freedoms do you want to insist on (as opposed
> to the DFSG)? and why should we accept lesser freedoms for this one
> class of software?
You are showing again that bad case of selective reading... I answered
to both questions in this thread.
> This is like saying that people will use star office whether it's DFSG
> free or not, so there is no reason to say "we won't distribute this
> until it's DFSG free". In fact, people can and do make things free.
Maybe eventually this will be true for firmwares too, but so far I have
not seen any third party writing from scratch a non-trivial firmware
without help from the hardware vendor.
This is why the proposed exception is temporary, recognizing that things
may change.
> We should tell users: we are unable to support this hardware, because
> we don't have the source. Among other things, we are unable to fix
> security bugs in it.
We are unable to fix security bugs in hardware with non-modifiable
firmware and modifiable but permanently stored firmware too. Should we
drop support for these devices too?
> No. Why do you think we insist on the source for programs in general?
> Why do we insist on the source for openoffice.org or emacs? Is it
> just mindless? No. It's for good and worthy reasons. You need to
> explain why those reasons somehow don't apply in the case of firmware.
We tried, but you are just not listening...
--
ciao,
Marco
|