Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jun 18, 2008, Anders Karlsson <anders at trudheim.co.uk> wrote:

> * Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> [20080618 21:50]:
>> On Jun 16, 2008, Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl> wrote:
> [snip]
>> > Not being able to ever change the firmware is good,
>> 
>> It's not.  Being Free to change it would undoubtedly be better.

> So what's stopping you?

Lack of information.

> Go buy the programming manual for the chip,

It's not available.

> or discuss with the chip manufacturer to get the specs

They don't want to provide them.

> as there may not be a programming manual along the line what you
> find with say an Intel CPU.

There is, but they choose to keep it to themselves.

> As the firmware may be written from scratch in hex, that may be your
> *only* option.

That's fine, as long as the firmware *is* written from scratch in hex.
If not, the vendors are artificially and unethically depriving me of
information.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}