A step in the wrong direction is "locking firmware", where a loadable firmware is made read-only by storing it to a ROM. It has been planned by the GTA04 phone project, and Raspberry foundation also considers making a locked GPU ROM device. This is madness that needs to stop. It may fulfill the letter of FSF guidelines, but it is firmly against the spirit. It does not increase freedom - it takes away vendors ability to provide bugfixes to firmware, and communities possibility of reverse engineering the firmware.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
My 5 eurocents on the Rasberry Pi opengl driver debacle
The Linux community rather unenthusiastic about the open source shim to Raspberry PI GPU. I think the backslash is a bit unfair, even if the marketing from Raspberry was pompous - It is still a step in the right direction. More raspberry PI hardware enablement code is open source than before.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think the point was that it was suggested/endorsed by the FSF to do it this way. This post seems to confirm that. This way lies insanity, of course, but it's not just following the letter of FSF's suggestions but following their apparent spirit.
ReplyDelete