alt Hacker NewsI have yet to see a real case of "binary blob for regulatory reasons". What law prevents open source RF firmware?
The device needs to operate in spec and if someone reflashes it with out of spec firmware, that's no different than someone soldering a different resistor onto the PCB or feeding the output of the chip into an amplifier and large antenna. It's a modification by the user and so the user is liable for operating out of spec. And all of this really unrelated to source code, just to reflashablitiy. The code could easily be open, but the productions device could be made unflashable if the law really required it. Yet this is not what we see here.
It's IP reasons, and that's fine, but let's not make up additional excuses for them.
> The code could easily be open, but the productions device could be made unflashable if the law really required it.
Excellent point. Many people (myself included) do assume that open source = redeployable, as in GPL3. I guess an e-fuse for read-only is perfectly OK, both from regulatory standpoint, and for ensuring you're running the same code as what you have the source for. That would be cool.