Give Me Libre or Give Me Death!

Not precisely FUD, but still a tremendously entertaining read from the LWN. The primary assertion is that Linux (the kernel) is not free software despite the fact that it is licensed under an OSI approved license.

Apparently, this has been true since 1995 when the first firmware blob appeared in Linux. I was stunned. Here, I thought that firmware blobs were simply bits of executable code loaded directly onto a device and thereafter interacted with solely through previously defined interfaces while providing the benefit of allowing small tweaks to be made to devices to work around problems.

Little did I know that because I don’t control the bits and bobs executing on a specialized computing device that interacts with the rest of the computer through well defined interfaces I am living shackled.

Now that that’s out of the way we should all point and laugh at these imbeciles who maintain Linux-libre for trying to weaken Linux’s already shoddy driver support by stripping out firmware.

My personal favorite quotes:

“As we accumulated thousands of patterns to recognize blobs, sequences
that look like blobs but that aren’t, requests for non-Free firmware
external to Linux, and documentation that induces users to install it,
running the GNU sed script generated to locate and remove blobs became
too expensive for many users: in recent releases of Linux-libre, GNU
sed took some 15 seconds and more than 2GB of RAM to compile all the
patterns in the script.”

“Recently we came up with another way to achieve the goal of stopping
the kernel from inviting users into the trap of non-Free Software:
where Linux requests a firmware file that we know is non-Free, we
could anonymize the blob name with a unidirectional hash of its name
and a kernel build and/or session identifier, and issue a request for
a file named after the computed hash.”

The thought of all that engineering manpower gone effectively to waste saddens me and reminds me why Linux is doomed outside of specialized applications.

Note: Tagged as LinuxIsForRealPeople™ for dramatic irony because I can totally see a real person going through this to be more free.