On Sat, Oct 25 2008, Jeff Carr wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 22:22, Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> It should not take us an indefinite time to release with
>> firmware blobs gone. I'll stake my reutation that the period involved
>> is not indefinite, and there is a upper boundary to it.
>>
>> Testing out the patches that have been produced by Ben ought not
>> to take "indefinite" time. It took me just a couple of hours to test
>> the kernels on the four machines I own; and they worked just fine. Of
>> course, my machines are not affected by the firmware issues, so I know
>> this means little for the regression testing.
>
> I'm willing to stake my reputation on betting you are _not_ a firmware
> engineer. Your are totally wrong if you think all firmware blobs can
> be replaced by human readable source.
I used to be, but that was a lifetime ago. However, this is
irrelevant, you are framing the discussion incorrectly.
Your argument boils down to: There is function that will never
be supported by free software. Annoying people by asking them to expose
their function by freeing the software just ittitates them, so we
should just suck it up and accept it.
Great. So there is function that can't be supported by free
software. Wer know that. Some user might need that functionality. We
know that too. We (gasp) even put it into the social contract over a
_decade_ ago.
Guess how we cater to people who need non-free software for
some functionality they must have? We put it into a place called the
non-free archive.
You do not have to be a "firmware engineer" to grok that.
manoj
ps: back in the day, before I became a quantum mechanic, I toyed around
with seeing if designing microprocessors was for me. I did design a 27
instructions, 4 bit microprocessor with microcode, so I get what
firmware is.
--
The graveyards are full of indispensable men. Charles de Gaulle
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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