The distinction between hardware and software has historically been relatively easy to understand - hardware is the physical object that software runs on. This is made more complicated by the existence of programmable logic like FPGAs, but by and large things tend to fall into fairly neat categories if we're drawing that distinction.

Conversations usually become more complicated when we introduce firmware, but should they? According to Wikipedia, Firmware is software that provides low-level control of computing device hardware, and basically anything that's generally described as firmware certainly fits into the "software" side of the above hardware/software binary. From a software freedom perspective, this seems like something where the obvious answer to "Should this be free" is "yes", but it's worth thinking about why the answer is yes - the goal of free software isn't freedom for freedom's sake, but because the freedoms embodied in the