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2025-05-31 14:41:40 UTC
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GNU tar :gnujihad: on Nostr: nprofile1q…xvklh GNU/翠星石 The FSF does not claim that these elements are ...


The FSF does not claim that these elements are software, but rather that, although they can be considered software from a design perspective, in practice they are hardware.

Writing instructions on a sheet of paper does not constitute software by itself, but rather a tangible representation of software (like printed source code). That sheet is merely a physical medium. For those instructions to be software, they must be in a format that a computer can interpret or execute.

The base microcode etched into a CPU's silicon is not a program that the processor executes or interprets. Instead, it functions as a finite state machine implemented in hardware — a fixed set of rules and physical connections (states and transitions) that guide the CPU’s internal behavior to execute complex instructions.