on disabling drivers that use non-Free firmware

Richard M Stallman rms at gnu.org
Wed Jan 21 20:32:21 UTC 2009


    If we're talking about drivers, the user won't usually know they're asking
    for firmware files, unless she's knowledgeable enough to check dmesg.  OTOH
    I think it's bad to assume the firmware is always going to be non-free.  It
    could be liberated, or others could write a replacement, and then not having
    the ability to load the free version becomes a technical inconvenience.

When someone frees a firmware package, we can add the driver we
previously removed.  I don't think that firmware blobs will be freed 5
times a day thus and overload us ;-{.



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