I’ve been bootstrapping a few new systems recently (with Gnewsense of course) and living in an area that is as far from broadband as you can get, have been looking for modems to install with or in my machines. However I seem to have hit a problem. I can find lots of modem s that are quite compatible with GNU/Linux systems using free drivers. However I have found one problem due to the nature of hardware modems. Hardware/controller based modems operate by having an onboard Digital Signal Processor that is controlled by a firmware locate in flash on the modem. This problem wouldn’t seem to be so bad if the flash was static but it is instead upgradeable/downgradable on every model I’ve ever seen (except for maybe really old ISA modems). The only difference between this and a binary blob for a wifi card is that the modems firmware is only uploaded once (either at the factory or by an update program later). Would anyone agree this is getting into a non-free situation? Does the fact that it has its own little binary-only-firmware that makes it act like a serial device that can be accessed by a free serial device driver exclude it as a free system only option? Or am I over analyzing?
It doesn’t help my feelings much that the FSF’s hardware pages don’t even have the modem link active.
Please someone tell me I’m wrong. I did rather like using the internet.
This would probably go better on the mailing list but I can’t post it there because I’m out of an email address at the moment and am still working on getting a new permanent one. So I’ll post it here.
--Darren F. Hall
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