On Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 10:20:00AM +0300, Andrei POPESCU wrote: > On the other hand, if the device would accept only firmware signed by > the manufacturer the code itself could be open sourced. > > Users would still depend on the manufacturers to actually release > updates, but at least they would have a way to contribute improvements > to the code.
It would still fail any reasonable definition of "free software", though, including Debian's DFSG. The user is not free to make any changes to the software, not even for their own personal use. They're not even free to rebuild the firmware and verify that it matches the official binary. All they can do is look at the code and hope that the binary blob actually matches it. So, even in this hypothetical universe, the firmware would still be in the non-free section.
