On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 15:03 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote: > On 5/2/07, Rex Dieter <rdieter@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Ralf Corsepius wrote: > > > > > On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 08:21 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote: > > >> Alexandre Oliva wrote: > > >> > > >> >> Atleast in Fedora the division is clearly documented in the > > >> >> packaging guidelines. > > >> > > > >> > Which is and has always been incompatible with the stated > > >> > goals of the Fedora project. > > >> > > >> It may be worth pointing out here that Fedora currently only includes > > >> objectives/packaging-guidelines to be opensource/redistributable, not > > >> necessarily (100%) free, > > > > > > This sentence of yours doesn't match with current practices: > > ... > > > The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to > > > build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from > > > open source software. > > > > I fail to see any mismatch: I said opensource, the "goal" says > > opensource. Unless you're trying to extend this goal to firmware, but > > we'd already (hopefully) established clearly that this is an *exception*. > > > > > => The firmware packages do not fall under this definition. > > > > Right, since *firm*ware != *soft*ware Great, what do you think do embedded SW devs do? They don't develop SW? They don't write programs, libraries, ...? Are you really serious? > and was the point of my "doesn't > > run on host-cpu" qualifier. The rest I pretty much agree with, and > > certainly in a perfect world we'd all love 100% opensource firmware too. > I think the difference between firm and soft is non-existant in some > eyes. Right, this difference doesn't exist. In general, "firmware" are binary images (a container) and can contain arbitrary things to be processed in arbitrary ways. In most cases, "firmware" will contain executable code and data being started by some kind of "loader" on a device. In a nutshell, to me, trying to separate "firmware" from "software" is as silly as trying to define "software" as being stored on "floppy". > If it is a bit, it must be documented and must be hackable. I > don't think that any debate/reasonable questions would change this > world-view. Right. I find the argumentation being used to wrt. firmware/SW and the Open/Free Software, to be "lawyerish language", being utilized to construct a case by splitting hairs on wording. Did former US Pres. Clinton inhale? Did he have sex with M.L.? We all know, he didn't. Is Fedora a pure OSS system? We all know it is. Ralf _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
