There are systems consisting of wholly free software, and in some cases the hardware is also driven by free software.What about mice? Do mice have software on them which would make them nonfree? I've plugged this mouse into Ubuntu, Debian and Trisquel Linux distributions and was never prompted to install any nonfree software, which leads me to assume that mice are generic and just send keycodes to the computer.Computer Mice seem like trivial devices. But I do own a more sophisticated mouse which can be loaded up with macros, so it doesn't seem like mice are necessarily so trivial, and the software driving those macros is probably nonfree. Would using either of these mice exempt me from running a wholly free system? (Or would the supposed triviality of such software--perhaps it is unable to make network requests, for instance--make it a non-issue?)
Can a mouse be free software?
hardware
Trivially, a mouse can't be free software, because a mouse is not software.So what other questions could this be?Can a mouse's drivers be free and or open source software?Can a mouse's design be free/open?Can a mouse's firmware be free/open?To all questions, the answer is, obviously, yes, it can be. If there exist advanced mice with non-free firmware (the coding on the chips in the mouse), I don't know, but from a gut feeling* I assume it won't be all that many. The same goes for the design. I doubt many high-end manufacturers would go for an open design, as one of their main selling point often is their design.As for the drivers, there usually exist free drivers all consumer peripherals.*warning: answer contains a gut feeling. There are hardware manufacturers that embraced open technology, but it's not much, and gaming mice, the kind that usually have macros, are not generally closesly affiliated with the open source or free software movements. 