nostr:npub1z4ppnl4myf7dr30t6lhdah3d7apdtsa5skwj0lttjl08flyn97rs0z4u3u Frankly, what manufacturers call "firmware" is software almost all of the time.

I've determined that firmware is correctly used to refer to microprocessor instructions in external ROM chips - firm, being that you could couldn't electronically reprogram such chips, but could physically replace them - alas not much hardware is like that anymore.

Now, manufacturers use it to refer to their proprietary software that they don't want you to understand or replace.

For manufacturers who want to sell hardware that runs or works with Android, BusyBox/Linux and GNU/Linux, complying with the GPLv2 is as simple as dumping the source code over the wall and typically the community will clean up the driver and maintain it - but manufacturers don't want to do that - they write a driver specifically for Linux, which is clearly a derivative work, but instead of adding that as a module, they go run it on a microprocessor on the device and add a software loader plus a shim and they keep doing it, as most big Linux copyright holders have pledged not to sue.


Linux-libre certainly removes all of such proprietary software.