Added: Jul 26, 2008
From: sunnz
Duration: 9:37
From the words of OpenBSD Develoeprs: "OpenBSD emphasizes security. It also emphasizes openness. All the code is there for all to see. Blobs are vendor-compiled binary drivers without any source code. Hardware makers like them because they obscure the details of how to make their hardware work. They hide bugs and workarounds for bugs. Newer versions of blobs can weaken support for older hardware and motivate people to buy new hardware. Blobs are expedient. Many other open source operating systems cheerfully incorporate them; in fact their users demand them. But when you need to trust the system, how do you check the blob for quality? For adherence to standards? How do you know the blob contains no malicious code? No incompetent code? Inspection is impossible; you can only test the black box. And when it breaks, you have no idea why. Blobs can be 'de-supported' by vendors at any time. Blobs cannot be supported by developers. Blobs cannot be fixed by developers. Blobs cannot be improved. Blobs cannot be audited. Blobs are specific to an architecture, thus less portable. Blobs are quite often massively bloated. OpenBSD does attempt to convince vendors to release documentation, and often reverse-engineers around the need for blobs. OpenBSD remains blob-free. Anyone can look at it, assess it, improve it. If it breaks, it can be fixed." http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39
Channel: Tech
Tags: ??f6u???떋?w?jb6^6? ??f?-sz ?ra??
Rating: 4.67 (3 ratings) Views: 381 Comments: 5
nnasby63 Says:
Jul 26, 2008 - you can read the quote: "According to Microsoft, 28% of all crashes of their Vista operating system in 2007 were due to bugs in the binary blob drivers for Nvidia graphics cards.[5]"
nnasby63 Says:
Jul 26, 2008 - and I can just take gnome off gnewsense if I wanted to and use it as a server, kinda like Ubuntu JEOS which in general is toards servers like BSD, so thats why I think it's somewhat BSD like but your right I was going to far, I should have just said curtain features are like BSD, not the whole, because I know about Linus Torvalds, the kernel is way different! I'm not trying to be mean or mean I'm always nice alot, these are just what I think, you a nice job :)
sunnz Says:
Jul 26, 2008 - Ok, what I was trying to say was, while it is in gNewsense's best interest to remove all blobs, they were not able to do so 100%... for example, one of the messages from the gnewsense mailing list: lists.gnu . org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2007-11/msg00042 . html
sunnz Says:
Jul 26, 2008 - "I don't know how to "find" binary blobs. I dont' know what they look like in the source, so I'm almost totally useless as to determining non-license freedom - Brian's Builder tools are very limited to the version of the kernel gNewSense uses and will have to be re-tooled to handle the newer versions that future versions will be built. Because of this, despite our PFV we're still not 100% sure that user's freedoms are fully protected."
sunnz Says:
Jul 26, 2008 - So, what I was saying is that, gnewsense could still have a few blobs around, it could be we just don't know about it that it is deep in the kernel, or developers haven't got time to locate the blob yet... e.g. bug 00166: bugs.gnewsense . org/Bugs/00166 OpenBSD on the other hand though, simply doesn't let blobs in the base system in the first place, so they don't have this problem of finding and removing blobs.
nnasby63 Says:
Jul 26, 2008 - you can get a program using apt-get called vrms it gives you a list of blobs if there are any on you system.
sunnz Says:
Jul 26, 2008 - Heh yea I played around with it a bit before... however I think that has its limits as well, I mean, it probably just checks what's on your system against a list of popular blobs in a database... I mean, I could have made blob myself, there is no way to write a program to detect that!!
kaeyCee Says:
Oct 6, 2008 - pig `
nnasby63 Says:
Jul 26, 2008 - gobuntu still has blobs, gnewsense started earlier, and they had all the blobs removed. It is BSD like because it is just as secure, most BSD say no to blobs like openBSD, but unlike BSD, GNU/Linux is unix-like, and BSD is true unix because it came directly from AT&T unix, anyway cool video!