ROM to firmware creep is understandable, given flexibility that you mentioned. But to an end-user, is there a difference between having a blob in ROM vs firmware, if both are closed source?
I don't think so. Every component on my system that runs firmware is significantly more complicated than the iterations that didn't. 802.11ax is much harder than 802.11b, for instance.
> But to an end-user, is there a difference between having a blob in ROM vs firmware, if both are closed source?
Yeah, bugs that are discovered after release can be fixed.
I definitely understand that real benefit.
But I was questioning the premise that having blob in ROM is somehow better than needing same blob in firmware, simply because that one doesn’t need/want to distribute non-free firmware on media.
If one wanted libre hardware, then both cases are not great.
Oh right! I absolutely believe that having non-free firmware on media is preferable - in some cases this has led to free implementations that replace the non-free firmware, and even outside that, given the choice between non-free code that doesn't work and non-free code that does, I'd prefer to take the latter.
I don't think so - it's more a function of hardware becoming more complicated, and vendors choosing to put a lot of the logic in firmware rather than putting it in ROM because there's a much lower chance of them getting it right first time now than there was in the past.