On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 11:07, Robert Epprecht wrote: > martin rumori <lists@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 05:06:53PM +0200, ChristianH wrote: > >> Why is it so important to load the firmware? > >> > >> Do they put in an extra light firmware at the factory, in order to keep > >> shipping weights low? <gr> > > > > to keep shipping weights rather low, they put in NO firmware in some > > hardware (just a loader). firmware is included with the driver and > > required to be uploaded to the device on every initialization or at > > least after every power on. > > Which can be very problematic, as some people do take it *very* serious > with free software and refuse to include firmware which is not under GPL > or a similar free licence in their distribution... > > In my case it was the firmware of a RME Hammerfall card which (some) > Debian people do not want to distribute... The case made me switch > from AGNULA/DeMuDi to Planet CCRMA (Which are both excellent audio > distributions BTW) > > Robert Epprecht To me this is about as silly as Linux people get. (Not you Robert!) The 'firmware' that's being discussed here is stuff that goes in external hardware. It's not part of the OS and doesn't run on the machine running Linux. What a silly thing to do in a world full of DSP processors where most everything is either firmware or downloadable to external processors of one type or another, to say they won't distribute this stuff. I can understand not wanting to polute their source code database, but not a mentality that says no one should hook a Debian machine to a piece of hardware that uses proprietary software or that people have to go other places to get it. Weird....but then I'm a blatent capitalist with many patents to my name and working for a start-up IP company that extracts large sums of money from people all the time for this sort of stuff, so admitedly I'm not a Debian-head... ;-) - Mark
