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Personally I find the FSF binary firmware recommendations questionable - either you have the source code to the firmware and can modify it and rebuild it or you

Personally I find the FSF binary firmware recommendations questionable - either you have the source code to the firmware and can modify it and rebuild it or you don't. Playing games about where such source code less binary blob is stored will not change much. Also AFAIK in some cases FSF even recommends storing firmware blobs on a separate ROM, so that they can't be updated. This apparently somehow makes the proprietary fimware an unchanging component of the hardware of the device and thus perfectly fine from the FSF perspective. How this prevents security updates for the firmware or the use of free software firmware if it is developed in the future seems to be less important.

seba_dos1 7y ago
To be honest, in hardware you have absolutely no idea whether your components use some non-free firmware inside, and they sit everywhere these days: battery charging controllers, accelerometers, SD cards, even USB-C cables. You can't even be sure that the blob is not updatable either - at best you can only know that the update process is not documented. You simply have to put the line somewhere, and while you can argue whether the place FSF puts their line on is correct, you can't really take the idealistic "no blobs whatsoever" stance there - it just doesn't work this way. Even FSF, of all organizations, is not doing that, and that should be already telling ;)