Fedora not "free" enough for GNU?

[Andrew Haley]

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.

Andrew.