"Jeff Carr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There is hardware, for which to function, will always, for the > lifetime of the equipment, require a firmware blob to operate. This > will always be the case; there will never be a human readable version. > It will never be possible to compile it (with non-free compilers) from > source code.
How can that be? (That is an ernest question) The engineers will have some description of what the firmware should do (in terms of what to read and write from which register etc., not only in terms of "initialize communication"), and some rules how to translate these procedures into a binary blob. I doubt the translation needs to be done by hand, instead of by a compiler, but even if it was, wouldn't the software be useful? And couldn't the "description of what the firmware should do" be treated as the source, then? I mean, your argument seems to be "there is no such thing as source for firmware, so we cannot possibly require it". But isn't that description of the function just the source? Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Debian Developer (TeXLive) ADFC Miltenberg B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
