> Ah so all of a sudden running a verifiable system is considered idealism.
Did you build your own CPU? Write your own firmware? Audit hardware and firmware for device with access to system memory[1]? Write your own kernel? Verify your compiler[2]? Audit every line of code for everything you run? If not, you're deciding the particular areas where you choose to harbor the illusion that you're seriously verifying something.
Fundamentally at some point you have to trust your hardware vendors unless you have unlimited resources to audit everything. Open source is just part of that picture and, like everything else in security, doing it professionally requires you to be pragmatic by balancing absolute security in a particular area against your users’ ability to actually do what they care about.
If FreeBSD did not ship a binary driver the overwhelmingly more likely outcome would be fewer people using FreeBSD. If you care about FreeBSD, as the developers presumably do, you want as many users as possible to improve the odds of being taken seriously when you try to negotiate better support with a vendor. Consider how much trouble OLPC had with WiFi firmware – that gives you a bottom range estimate for the number of units sold which has to be on the line before a hesitant vendor will consider opening something.
We're playing the let's jump to absurd extremes game, are we? Ok, there's no point in any of it - nothing can be trusted - I'll go and install windows.
Did you build your own CPU? Write your own firmware? Audit hardware and firmware for device with access to system memory[1]? Write your own kernel? Verify your compiler[2]? Audit every line of code for everything you run? If not, you're deciding the particular areas where you choose to harbor the illusion that you're seriously verifying something.
Fundamentally at some point you have to trust your hardware vendors unless you have unlimited resources to audit everything. Open source is just part of that picture and, like everything else in security, doing it professionally requires you to be pragmatic by balancing absolute security in a particular area against your users’ ability to actually do what they care about.
If FreeBSD did not ship a binary driver the overwhelmingly more likely outcome would be fewer people using FreeBSD. If you care about FreeBSD, as the developers presumably do, you want as many users as possible to improve the odds of being taken seriously when you try to negotiate better support with a vendor. Consider how much trouble OLPC had with WiFi firmware – that gives you a bottom range estimate for the number of units sold which has to be on the line before a hesitant vendor will consider opening something.
1. http://md.hudora.de/presentations/#firewire-pacsec 2. http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html