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Re: Eliminating closed source?



Salut,

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 10:38:45AM -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:13:50AM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> >
> > How hard is it to build a kernel without including any closed-source
> > components?  (For example, most of dev/microcode/, and of course
> > anything depending on it, would have to go.)
> 
> Are you going to stop using all the devices in your system which carry
> their closed-source microcode in ROM, too?
> 
> (I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious.  This seems
>  profoundly impractical to me -- even modern Ethernet controllers have
>  come full-circle to the early days and are microcoded again.)

You might not want to know this, but Debian did that in their latest
version. The results are a confused user base and hundreds of howtos
for patching the installer.

                                Tonnerre

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