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Comment by rekado | Hacker News Reader

Is this a service to encourage the distribution of proprietary software? Firmware ought to be built from source, like any other software that runs on my hardware.

I think it is dangerous to give legitimacy to proprietary software just because it doesn't get executed by the main CPU.

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In a perfect world there would only be open firmware for all devices. We don't live in such a perfect world, and even Linux users might have e.g. a Logitech unifying receiver. And nobody should disallow them to use one with Linux. Modern Linux comes with a huge set of firmware for e.g. DVB-T sticks or WiFi adapters.

Vendors should be allowed to distribute Linux compatible firmware for their products.

Vendors need a reasonable way to update the firmware, if there are e.g. severe security bugs.

Users should have a reasonable way of getting these updates, without having to constantly monitor all pages for all their devices (and switching over to WIN just to update the via a "Updater Tool v4.732.x").

This is a good thing. It makes peoples' devices more secure. The integration with Gnome is seamless and updating usually simple (it is quite a new thing though, and some specific things can always go wrong). Users are free to chose with which vendors they do business and whom to trust.

I don't think it's fair to supect Richard Hughes, who makes the ColorHug (open source/open hardware colorimeter) of trying to encourage proprietary firmware.

This is just a service to encourage up2date firmware, proprietary or not.

My comment was not meant to be a slight against the people behind the service. I just think that it is dangerous to give hardware people an alternative to doing things the right way, namely to allow for their "firware" to be built from source (and as part of the kernel).

Well, if they think it is too hard otherwise, they might decide the alternative is no update at all.

And I rather have a working binary blob on my Linux, than no open source driver at all.

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