Fedora not "free" enough for GNU?

[Conrad Meyer]

Quoth Gregory Maxwell:
> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> >
> >> The notion that firmware ought to be free isn't absurd: It doesn't
> >> take much effort to find examples of firmware imposing unreasonable
> >> limits on users, or firmware containing nasty hidden security bugs.
> >
> > Just to get away from the ethics flame^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion for a
> > moment...
> >
> > This makes me think of a really interesting question: security-
> > critical organizations presumably have to make use of commercially
> > available computers just like the rest of us.  Someone somewhere
> > must have thought about the issues of binary firmware blobs for
> > video and network hardware and their potential to leak data,
> > either deliberately or accidentally.  One of the many nice things
> > about free software is the fact that it's reasonably easy to inspect
> > it for security analysis; binary blobs weaken that.
> 
> There are two broad classes of 'security-critical organizations', real
> ones and pretenders. Most are pretenders, they fail to consider issues
> like this, then when it fails they show that they tried really hard
> and thus it isn't their fault.  Real ones consider these issues, and
> demand manufacturers comply with various security standards  which
> validate the security of the hardware/firmware.  Manufacturers often
> fail to actually do a good job of this, and can get away with it
> because bad security looks just like good security. ... so then when
> it fails the security-critical organization points to the standards
> that were violated, thus demonstrating the breech was not their fault.
>  :) :)
> 
> I've found two blobs I use on my systems, one of them very obviously
> is a FPGA image, another one is appears to be software for a small
> micro-controller.  I'm not so sure that the FSF would consider the
> FPGA image software, but I don't know that they've considered this
> issue in the context of OS-shipped blobs (in fact, I've heard FPGAs !=
> software from them in the past), I think the vast majority of the
> blobs distributed in fedora are software for an embedded general
> purpose CPU and not FPGA images (generally FPGAs are enough of an
> additional per-unit cost thet you don't see them in mass market
> devices). (RME hammerfall firmware is the FPGA image, incidentally).
> 
> As was pointed out here, a spin could be created easily enough.  It
> would make the FSF happy, as well as some number of other people (it
> would make me happy, if for no other reason than I'd get a better
> understanding of which of these blobs I'm actually using).

The spin's already been created, it's called BLAG.

Regards,
-- 
Conrad Meyer <konrad at tylerc.org>