On Sun, Nov 26, 2006 at 11:05:27PM +0100, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
So, did you get a (small) update from the vendor, or did you pull off the semi-impossible task of rewriting the thing from scratch :-)
Sure, we got the vendor patch. But I'm glad we were not the *first* people to run into this problem. It would have taken days or weeks for the vendor to do something, I'm sure.
This doesn't solve a _problem_. Oh, and there are plenty of binary patches you can find around the web that do such things. They typically void your warranty *for a good reason* though.
We don't really care about that, though, right :) Installing LinuxBIOS voids the board vendor's warranty too, I'm sure.
And there is the whole Free as in Freedom aspect of course. I think 'because we want Free software' is a really good reason.
It would be nice to have, yes, but I think right now we have much bigger problems to solve first.
Sure. This whole thread is pretty hypothetical. I'm just answering your question, pointing out a few reasons why free firmware for devices might be a good idea.
Also, just look at those Linksys wireless routers (WRT54G). There's a whole ecosystem out there - people are doing things with them that were *never* anticipated by Linksys.
Yes. And none of those new things have anything to do (directly) with firmware changes.
Sure - my point was that opening up a black-box 'device' can lead to some pretty amazing innovation.
Basically, having Free firmware for things like hard drives could allow some amazing innovation.
...and will lead to *lots* of bricked drives ;-)
Maybe video cards or network cards would be a better example here. But, yes.
I'm not convinced you can really; esp. not legally. But yeah, that "geek factor" would make me want to do it, sure -- except I see a HDD as 100% a black box with no internals that I care about (or want to care about). I also don't feel like reprogramming the ucode on CPUs, or even the ucode on a flash chip's internal controller, etc.
But your network interface? Video card?
Thanks, Ward.