Alexandre Oliva wrote:
The tolerance for non-Free Software in Linux's sources (and anywhere else), be it non-Free firmware blobs, be it drivers developed under NDA (whose code is obscured and harder or impossible to understand and adapt to one's needs as a consequence of the NDA), all revolve around acceptance, endorsement and even promotion of unethical practices that I don't want to condone or participate in.
Not wanting to participate in distributing code without source is one thing; calling it unethical is something else and implies that everyone else is wrong for doing it.
Working towards retaining the ability for people to distribute and use blobs along with Linux, rather than merely removing the blobs like we do in Linux-libre, amounts to condoning this practice. It does not advance our cause. In fact, as others pointed out, such changes make it easier for unethical vendors to add even more of their blobs to Linux (or co-maintained packages), which is actually detrimental to our cause:
And again, vendors who distribute code without source are not necessarily unethical even if you don't want to participate in helping the people who would find that code useful or necessary.
Have fun. And please don't bother disputing the values that led to my conclusion, they're firmly set and the flame war would probably just annoy everyone who doesn't enjoy this kind of discussion. Now, if you find any flaws in the reasoning that took me from the premises to the conclusions, I'd be happy to read about them and discuss them.
Personally I consider competition and equality (i.e. having your choice of components) to be much more important than source availability for any component. Thus restrictions on combining and redistributing components are much more evil, unethical, and detrimental to long term developments than any current NDA or binary blob could ever be.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
