There are a number of reasons why binary blobs can cause problems.

A logical extraction is generally easier to work with as it does not produce a large binary blob.

Linux started including binary blobs in 1996.

Instruction sets must be reverse-engineered from binary blobs and emulated with virtually no documentation at all.

It is also a pejorative term for compiled code without the source code made available (see: binary blob).

The work to clear out the binary blobs began in 2006 with gNewSense's find-firmware and gen-kernel.

A wrapper is software which allows one operating system to use a binary blob driver written for another operating system.

Firmware, the software required by the onboard microcontrollers that accompany some hardware, is generally not considered to be a binary blob.

One point of licensing controversy is Linux's use of firmware "binary blobs" to support some hardware devices.

In the context of open source software, a binary blob is a closed source binary-only driver without publicly available source code.

In 2006, OpenBSD started the first campaign against the use of binary blobs, in kernels.

So you can't store an arbitrary binary blob like a JPEG picture in a C string.

Because some drivers, firmware, and "binary blobs" were removed from Gobuntu, it would run on fewer computers than Ubuntu.

Its goal is to maintain the user-friendliness of Ubuntu, but with all proprietary (e.g. binary blobs) and non-free software removed.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is actively campaigning against binary blobs.

The firmware image is known as the binary blob, while the associated ARM coded Linux drivers were initially closed source.

Some projects try to create a free operating system, and will not accept binary blobs if they cannot get documentation for hardware or source code for device drivers.

(), limited to plist-supported types (numbers, strings, booleans, tuples, lists, dictionaries, datetime and binary blobs)

Some device drivers include a binary blob, such as the Atheros HAL of FreeBSD versions before 7.2.

He is the maintainer of Linux-libre, a fork of the Linux kernel which removes non-free software components, such as binary blobs from the kernel.

Suddenly, it was a big deal that the Word format was a big binary blob, a sort of memory dump of whatever Word happened to be thinking about at the time.

The parts that have no source code are called binary blobs and are generally proprietary firmware which, while generally redistributable, generally do not give the user the freedom to modify or study them.

It can also index through binary columns, and use iFilters to extract meaningful text from the binary blob (for example, when a Microsoft Word document is stored as an unstructured binary file in a database).

When a vendor distributes software in an object binary form without any mention of its inner workings or code, it is called a 'proprietary OBB' or 'proprietary blob' or just binary blob.

Today most distros combine GNU packages with a Linux kernel which contains proprietary binary blobs and a number of proprietary programs (e.g. gratis but without availability of source code, thus non-free).