LWN headline: Blame Fedora = High Praise

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr 29, 2007, "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:

> It addresses it how? With rhetoric?

If you take rhetoric as an synonym with education, yes.

> Rhetoric is good, but it doesn't solve the primary problem:

It does, just not in the short term.  The more people accept
freedom-incompatible hardware, the more they feed the monster that
turns against them and all the community.

If people learn to reject that, such vendors will still be free to
offer such freedom-incompatible hardware, but their marketshare will
shrink, and more vendors will seek to respect people's freedom.

This is why it is so important to make people aware of the fact that
their hardware is incompatible with freedom.  Such that they can know
what to avoid next time they go shopping for computers or parts.

I've actually suggested a way Fedora could accomplish this:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2007-March/msg00169.html

But AFAIK nothing to this end was done.  Is it just because the
suggestion came in too late, is it unclear, or was it deemed too much
engineering effort to remain faithful to our stated goals?

> However, Fedora is not in a position where we can simply tell our users
> that we will not ship these files on political or moral grounds.

Is any part of my suggestion incompatible with your statement?

> We do the best that we can to compromise.

Compromising is precisely the problem ;-)

There's a way to not compromise and still let users take the step if
they want to, but instead we decide to take ourselves the step away
from our stated goals.

> We don't ship any "code" that is proprietary. We only permit
> firmware that is freely redistributable without restrictions.

Well, sorry, but that is proprietary code.  This line-drawing is just
double-thinking.

Proprietary firmware and proprietary BIOSes are just as inconvenient
as any kind of proprietary software.  I know I've suffered because I
couldn't fix a number of BIOSes in computers I've had, and upgradable
firmware in other devices I have.

> This compromise gives our users working wireless out of the box.

I understand the goal and I've suggested a way to accomplish this that
doesn't involve taking this step ourselves.

> Since the users cannot choose to download the firmware over their
> non-functional network,

That's why the suggestion involved driver disk-like media.

> the only other step that I think we could take would be to prompt
> the user during install that in order to make their wireless work,
> Fedora needs to install firmware that is not-free.

This would at least give more assurance to someone involved in the
development of clean-room firmware.  But just having downloaded the
software as part of Fedora could get someone covered by a
no-reverse-engineering clause in a license of this kind of firmware.
Do we really want to spread not only the message that using non-Free
Software is acceptable, but that it's ok to actively spread software
that limits the freedoms of others?

> 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.

I'm not involved with the FSF.

I've done what I could from the FSFLA standpoint, to no avail.

> But that is a much harder problem to solve, and involves less
> rhetoric.

It involves education.  And by silently loading such firmware into
people's computers, the opposite goal is achieved.  (Wrong) Way to go!

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}