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Posted by sharms at Mon Nov 27 22:32:23 2006
The lesson java teaches us is that if open source innovates commercial products will be forced to compete.  Don't misconstrue this.

Posted by J.B. Nicholson-Owens at Mon Nov 27 22:52:27 2006
sharms: Actually, the fight for a user's software freedom is what "open source" was designed to not talk about (also see RMS' response to a question at the most recent GPLv3 conference in Japan; pay particular attention to what you have to do to gain both software freedom as well as reliable and powerful software).  As a result of their choice, the folks at Canonical don't have a problem distributing non-free software and encouraging others to install non-free software, thus encouraging others to lose their software freedom.  Recently there was an Ubuntu press release about their choice to distribute Opera, the proprietary web browser, under their aegis (the proprietary browser can be installed "with a couple of clicks").  I believe that the default Ubuntu GNU/Linux install (for any architecture) includes proprietary software in the Linux kernel they distribute (so-called "firmware" which is uploaded to various devices to make them work).  gNewSense GNU/Linux is based on Ubuntu GNU/Linux and gNewSense hackers remove the non-free software and distribute the rest, leaving them with a 100% free software GNU/Linux system.

Also, what you mean by "commercial" is actually more accurately expressed as proprietary or possibly non-free.  Free software and commercial software address two different issues and it's best not to conflate them.

Posted by Trond Danielsen at Tue Nov 28 10:07:47 2006
J.B. Nicholson-Owens: I really think firmware is different from other software. Firmware is written for a particular device, usually requires custom compiler and other tools for that particular target, and the actual source code has very little use for other purposes. The alternative would be to store the firmware in a onboard flash or (E)EPROM, where nobody would concider it non-free software, but the only result of this would be to raise the cost of the hardware.

I think it is important to keep focus on the areas that matters, and not to get stuck in minor details such as firmware for a network controller.