[Fsf-Debian] A small thought on how Debian might be able to help.

John Sullivan johns at fsf.org
Fri Sep 5 17:05:57 UTC 2014


Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net> writes:

> On 09/05/2014 12:32 PM, Brian Gupta wrote:
>> As an aside, how are certain wifi chipsets "FSF blessed"? Is it
>> because they keep any firmware on non-volatile storage (meaning no
>> blobs have to be delivered by OS) and not field upgradable, or is it
>> because they somehow provide sourcecode for the firmware, which
>> distros are free to compile into "free blobs"?
>
> the ath9k-htc at least has compilable firmware (though the compilation
> steps appear to involve patching the toolchain itself, so they are not
> particularly easy compared to most debian build processes):
>
>   https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware
>
> I can't speak for other "blessed" wifi devices.
>
> 	--dkg

The above is also a good example, because the firmware started its life
proprietary. In conversation with ThinkPenguin and the FSF, it was
released as free, thanks to the hard work and advocacy by engineers at
Atheros, like Luis Rodriguez. It's a demonstration that the kind of
thing Brian is suggesting is possible.

I'd really like some sort of document that we could point engineers to,
that they could show their managers, explaining the benefits to
releasing firmware as free software, and dispelling some myths. So far,
we haven't managed to write that.

For the FSF standards, the key is that there be no nonfree software. The
ath9k-htc one is the only currently FSF-certified chipset, but we would
consider others where there wasn't any firmware loaded by the kernel at
all. The more user-modifiable the device is, the better, but our
baseline standard only asks for no nonfree software.

IIRC, Intel is worried about the FCC standards, despite
<https://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2007/jul/06/sdr-paper/>.

-john

-- 
John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
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