LWN headline: Blame Fedora = High Praise

[Josh Boyer]

On Sun, 2007-04-29 at 21:28 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> Koh Choon Lin wrote:
> >> I want to see the FSF advising Fedora what it can do to influence the
> >> hardware vendors to not use firmware blobs without killing off our user
> >> base. But that is a much harder problem to solve, and involves less
> >> rhetoric.
> >
> > We need to convince the open source movement to join with us in
> > boycotting those companies whose hardware has no drivers.
> >
> 
> Our efforts would be better spent educating users and providing a 
> platform for the companies.  In the instance of firmware drivers the 
> difference between utopia and what is reasonable isn't that large.  Most 
> users won't go out of their way to boycott a company since "binary 
> drivers" != "killing kittens"

We don't ship binary drivers.  We ship freely redistributable firmware
that only runs on the card in question.

And every time someone installs a binary driver, a kitten dies¹.

josh

¹ I'm fairly confident that given the kitten mortality rate, and the
frequency at which users install binary drivers, this statement will be
statistically correct.  And even if they don't die, they turn bad and
get into your glibc and break your fgets.