Shuttleworth Wants To Get Rid of Proprietary Firmware 147
jones_supa writes "In a new blog post, the Ubuntu main man Mark Shuttleworth calls for an end to proprietary firmwares such as ACPI. His reasoning is that running any firmware code on your phone, tablet, PC, TV, wifi router, washing machine, server, or the server running the cloud your SAAS app is running on, is a threat vector against you, and NSA's best friend. 'Arguing for ACPI on your next-generation device is arguing for a trojan horse of monumental proportions to be installed in your living room and in your data center. I've been to Troy, there is not much left.' As better solutions, Shuttleworth suggests delivering your innovative code directly to the upstream kernel, or using declarative firmware that describes hardware linkages and dependencies but doesn't include executable code."
Re:Precisely how... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Precisely how... (Score:5, Insightful)
I design hardware. I could wait for someone to accept my changes into the Linux Kernel before I start testing it, or I could write some firmware accessible through ACPI.
What Shutters wants is irrelevant. What he needs is open interface specifications to the hardware.
What RMS has been saying all along. (Score:5, Insightful)
So people are just now figuring out that o'l fatty hippy beard Richard Stallman was right all along?
Color me fucking surprised! Any code you can't see can and will be used against you.
RMS says things that are uncomfortable and difficult but painfully true. Don't mistake is disinterest in your feelings (Or business model) as hostility.
Re:Possesion (Score:4, Insightful)
It's part of the GPLv666 under the "Demonic Possession" section if you use the "or any later version" clause. I hear Stallman wrote the original in blood, he couldn't find any open source ink. And you really don't want to know how the toe jam is involved.
Re:Silly Rabit (Score:4, Insightful)
it's called reference frameworks. By the time you get to Userland, a Creative soundcard looks to the software identical to a Turtle Beach. This would be impossible without a reference. One obvious example is DirectX. What you want out of the arse end of the driver layer is a device interface that's compatible with DirectX. What happens between the driver layer and the hardware is entirely up to the manufacturer, but the DirectX compatibility is a certain requirement for even the slightest hope that you'll even get a peep out of it in Windows. And one of the reasons why the Linux driver model, at least from my own personal perspective, is horribly broken. Is there a reference framework for *anything* in Linux?