On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Dave Anderson wrote:
quoted text
> You've left out the extremely important fact that many vendors
> interpret acceptance of blobs by any "free" OS as validating their
> position of not releasing adequate documentation -- so accepting blobs
> (even when "there's no other choice") actively harms the anti-blob
> campaign.

It harms more than just the campaign, it harms anyone wanting to maintain
a modicum of options further down the road in regards to hardware
lifecycles, operating system and kernel lifecycles, and last but not least
security.

One anecdote regarding insecurity of mysterious binaries / BLOBs:
A local privilege escation has been known to exist, unfixed, for several
years in nvidia's binary drivers:
 	http://lwn.net/Articles/204541/

However, if you can't audit (and subsequently compile) all the code,
including the applications, libraries, compilers and OS, then you've got
nothing secure and nothing that can be made secure - regardless of
anecdotes, no amount of assurances, claims, hand waving, shouting, smoke,
noise etc. from vendors.  Don't take my word for it, read what the ACM had
to say about it:
 	http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

But it's not just 'security' that is at risk.  The lifecycle of both the
operating system/kernel and the hardware that rely on the continued
availability of the BLOBs become dependent on the BLOBs producers.  Those
are groups which may or may not continue to have interests and motivations
which overlap yours.  If your hardware or system needs a BLOB to run, then
the BLOB-maker has you on a leash.

Endorsing BLOBs puts *all* hardware, systems, and security at risk through
active effort, which is reprehensible.  To have one system accepting them,
makes it all that much harder to keep them off.  Think digital scab.

Tolerating BLOBs or failing to eliminate BLOBs, are simply balless passive
means of putting the above at risk.  To put it another way, it's possible
to gain control (political, economical, technical) of systems that get
locked into BLOBs either passively or actively and encroachment into one
system/distro can be used to marginalize the others.

So to put it as kindly as I can, only people somewhere on the spectrum
between stupid and troll would be advocating acceptance or tolerance of
BLOBs.  It's an act of harm that affects more than just the system with
the BLOB.

-Lars
Lars NoodC)n (larsnooden@openoffice.org)
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