To put a bit of a finer point on it: Stallman has said (paraphrasing; I&#x27;m having trouble finding a good source) that self-contained embedded firmware&#x2F;microcode without an update mechanism isn&#x27;t &quot;software&quot; in a sense relevant to the Free Software movement. Rather, it&#x27;s equivalent to a hardwired state machine, and we can judge its behavior as a single object, notwithstanding what its architecture looks like internally.