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Concept
Binary blob
Summary
In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system, and is sometimes also applied to code running outside the kernel, such as system firmware images, microcode updates, or userland programs. The term blob was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity.
When computer hardware vendors provide complete technical documentation for their products, operating system developers are able to write hardware device drivers to be included in the operating system kernels. However, some vendors, such as Nvidia, do not provide complete documentation for some of their products and instead provide binary-only drivers. This practice is most common for accelerated graphics drivers, wireless networking devices, and hardware RAID controllers. Most notably, binary blobs are very uncommon for non-wireless network interface controllers, which can almost always be configured via standard utilities (like ifconfig) out of the box; Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD attributes this to the work done by a single FreeBSD developer.
Some FSF-approved projects strive to provide a free operating system and will remove all binary blobs when no documentation for hardware or source code for device drivers and all applicable firmware is available; such projects include Linux-libre kernel packaging from FSFLA, Parabola, Devuan, Trisquel, and LibreCMC. However, the vast majority of open-source projects make a distinction between binary-only device drivers (blobs) and binary-only firmware (not considered blobs), allowing for certain proprietary firmware to be freely distributed as part of their kernels, and, to the disagreement of some core contributors, also support the use of proprietary device drivers that are distributed externally, providing internal compatibility interfaces for such proprietary drivers and userspace components to work with their system.
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