Alexandre Oliva wrote:
The tolerance for non-Free Software in Linux's sources (and anywhere
else), be it non-Free firmware blobs, be it drivers developed under
NDA (whose code is obscured and harder or impossible to understand and
adapt to one's needs as a consequence of the NDA), all revolve around
acceptance, endorsement and even promotion of unethical practices that
I don't want to condone or participate in.
Not wanting to participate in distributing code without source is one
thing; calling it unethical is something else and implies that everyone
else is wrong for doing it.
Working towards retaining the ability for people to distribute and
use
blobs along with Linux, rather than merely removing the blobs like we
do in Linux-libre, amounts to condoning this practice. It does not
advance our cause. In fact, as others pointed out, such changes make
it easier for unethical vendors to add even more of their blobs to
Linux (or co-maintained packages), which is actually detrimental to
our cause:
And again, vendors who distribute code without source are not
necessarily unethical even if you don't want to participate in helping
the people who would find that code useful or necessary.
Have fun. And please don't bother disputing the values that led
to my
conclusion, they're firmly set and the flame war would probably just
annoy everyone who doesn't enjoy this kind of discussion. Now, if you
find any flaws in the reasoning that took me from the premises to the
conclusions, I'd be happy to read about them and discuss them.
Personally I consider competition and equality (i.e. having your choice
of components) to be much more important than source availability for
any component. Thus restrictions on combining and redistributing
components are much more evil, unethical, and detrimental to long term
developments than any current NDA or binary blob could ever be.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell(a)gmail.com