Some thoughts about firmware inclusion.

[Hans de Goede]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Mar 23 octobre 2007 02:39, Ian Chapman a écrit :
>> Adam Jackson wrote:
>>
>>> This is not the same thing as a firmware, because firmware doesn't
>>> execute on the host CPU.  Practically speaking, that's where we draw
>>> the
>>> line.
>> This is not meant as a facetious question but how does this pan out
>> with
>> regards to emulators? Most of which require some sort of firmware
>> which
>> runs on the 'virtual' CPU which is technically speaking running on the
>> real CPU, perhaps even more so in cases where JIT compilation is used.
> 
> That probably means you need to package "firmware" building tools in
> fedora and use them to build the "firmware" source in the "firmware"
> package. And we may have been lax on the subject in the past for games
> but as the OP message shows it's a quick path to shipping pre-built
> closed java or.Net binaries and effectively having a non-free system.
> 
> Bootstrapping may be needed as in every language we've merged.
> 

Although I fully agree with the sentiment of the message, and I don want to see 
prebuilt jars or win32 exe's shipped, I think we need to be carefull here.

I would atleast like to see an exception for existing firmware images which 
execute on the main CPU. Or are we going to take qemu out of the distro until 
we have the toolchain in place to build the bios and vga-rom images from source?

Also where is the line between code and content? Levels for certain games 
contain instructions which get interpreted by the game engine.

So when a level has a button linked to opening a door does it become code?

I think the current rules work well, so lets keep them in place and discuss 
exceptions as they occur.

Regards,

Hans