Quote Originally Posted by jak3676 View Post
Some have speculated that Blizz may consider any hardware broadcasting to also be software broadcasting, as there's always micro-code/firmware/something running at some point, but I personally think that's a bit of a stretch. I don't think there have been any blue posts at all to clarify what they mean by "software".
This isn't targeted directly at you, but to folks who are speculating on whether or not hardware sync is allowed, I ask this:

If Blizzard wanted to include hardware sync in the ToS change, why didn't they just say so?

I think that announcements like the one a few weeks ago are very carefully crafted. If their intention was to action hardware they would have made that clear. It is as simple as saying "third party input broadcast software and any hardware that sends input to more than one computer simultaneously". They repeatedly used the word software and did not mention hardware.

I'm hearing more people make the assessment that firmware == software. This is amusing to me to some extent. In a conceptual way, firmware is a program and so I get the mental gymnastics going on. In practice, these terms are not interchangeable for people who have worked with computers or in IT for any period of time.

Firmware represents programs that run computer hardware. They are not user serviceable beyond updating to the latest version. In many cases (like a USB switch), it's a closed code base that we cannot alter. As users of a system we never interact with the firmware itself, we interact through it while the hardware does what it is meant to do.

For most people, "Software" represents programs that run in the user space of a computer. This is software that we actually control, configure and use. It has a totally different purpose when compared to firmware. I encourage zero people to take my word for it though. They should spend some time with Google, tell them to look for "firmware vs software".

Even still, a non-syncing USB switch has firmware. So if HW sync is actionable some day, it will be for a reason that does not involve the overly simplified reason that firmware is software. They'll hit us with something a little more concrete, I feel.