Ok, I'll try to break this loop here. You are repeating the great bene- fits for a user (that I agree to) even if a blob is involved. And I keep asking why it should happen on our master branch (I don't see how we would take something away by not maintaining everything. Also, I never tried to exclude all blobs). It seems somehow we talk past each other.
Nico
On 10.05.2018 23:26, Julius Werner wrote:
You really seem to miss the point of free software.
Okay, now this is starting to get personal again, let's please not go there. You too have been among those who spoke out against that in that derailment thread recently. It's insulting to insinuate that some of us don't understand or don't care about free software just because we're working for a big company. You also don't need to educate me about the spirit of the GPL or the fundamental travesty of jumping back and forth between blobs and GPL code a dozen times during a single boot and calling it okay because it's "technically not linking". I am aware of these things and I'm not happy about them either. But there have been blobs in most boards that were added to this project since before I started working on it and there will keep being blobs for the foreseeable future. You are not going to convince Intel to open-source their FSP by yelling at fellow coreboot developers about it. It's the reality we live in. This discussion started (as I understood it) about how we can make the blob situation we *are* living with a little better, so let's keep it focused on that.
As long as everybody adheres to the copyleft, you can do things on your own. If a blob ends up being only useful for a single board, ok. Should somebody be able to sell his product with it, sure. But why should the community maintain that shit (partially on the shoulders of volunteers) if it doesn't pro- vide what free software provides?
"That shit" allows people to build custom firmware for the hardware that they bought, which I think is a very important and worthwhile benefit on its own. For Chromebooks, a whole little ecosystem of custom ROMs and build instructions has developed around this. Do you want to take that away from everyone just because some of the blobs may be mainboard specific? (And again, as far as I am aware most blobs aren't really tied to a specific mainboard, they're just SoC support which may or may not have been written to include whatever peripheral support a particular mainboard needs. You are really just complaining that peripheral support which the existing mainboards didn't need is not implemented yet, which is a situation that can happen just as well on a fully blob-free board.)
It's not just free software when you can port it to a completely new mainboard, in the same way that the coreboot core code is still free software even though you can't automatically port it to any new chipset. You can still add features or make changes to customize behavior for an existing board. You can make it boot your own operating system with custom calling convention, add some code signing or measuring framework, or make it play the Jeopardy melody on the speaker while it's booting. That, too, is a benefit of free software.