Re: Leaving the guix project

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

David Craven <david@craven.ch> writes:

>> vanilla Linux (which includes more than 150MB of binary blobs)
>
> Can you provide a reference?

I can’t find it any more (I think I saw it in an interview, but I cannot
find the article any more) and it looks like I was quite wrong about
this number.  My apologies!  It’s closer to a total of 6MB of blobs that
come with the sources of vanilla Linux (as of 4.10-rc8, checked by
comparing the uncompressed sources with a deblobbed version), most of
which are in the “firmware” directory.  Of course this doesn’t mean that
it’s 6MB in every compiled binary.

> I'm pretty sure the kernel developers care about free software too.

I’m not so sure given how there’s no official mechanism for users to
exclude blobs e.g. with a simple configuration flag.  The defects of
linux-libre which make it so that users have no choice whether to load
or refuse to load a blob are also a consequence of the general lack of
attention that kernel developers give to the issue of blobs.

Accepting pre-built binaries as part of kernel sources (6MB is quite a
lot of binary gibberish) is a strong indicator to me that at the very
least their concern for free software is expressed very differently from
mine.

> But I'm not going to justify my actions any more.

No need to justify anything.  We’re just expressing different
perspectives.

--
Ricardo

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