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Old 12th September 2008
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phoenix phoenix is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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"Binary blobs" and "binary/loadable firmware" are very different things.

Firmware runs on the hardware device itself (the harddrive, the soundcard, the wireless card, the NIC, the videocard, etc). A system without any firmware or firmware-loading mechanism will be a dead system (with the exception of the hardware that ships with the firmware onboard, of course). You can't run hardware without firmware. Period. The only difference between a piece of hardware that ships with the firmware onboard and one that ships with a driver that loads the firmware of the harddrive is where the firmware is stored (onboard or on disk). It would be really nice if people would stop the whole "no binary firmware" crap. OpenBSD is not anti-firmware (in fact, I don't know of any system that is).

Binary blobs or binary drivers are a completely different beast. These are things that run on your system, using your CPU, your RAM, etc. These are the things that can be troublesome. Who really knows what these things are doing on your system. These are the things that people who have an issue with binary blobs should be worried about. This is what OpenBSD is against.
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