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Or they're incentivizing firmware-less or open-firmware devices, while drawing a line where people can still choose certain devices that meet their purpose.
by ece 5y ago
Or they're incentivizing firmware-less or open-firmware devices, while drawing a line where people can still choose certain devices that meet their purpose.
- marcan_42 5y agoBut they aren't doing that; their Respects Your Freedom program is chock full of devices that run giant firmware blobs, which they conveniently ignore as long as they're on-device and not loaded from /lib/firmware, because as long as nobody notices they can keep believing they're living a blob-free life... Things the FSF has explicitly incentivized: - Moving firmware blobs from an obvious, inspectable place in the OS or bootloder to obscure firmware ROMs or Flash chips read by a convoluted process involving multiple CPUs, because somehow doing the latter makes it freedom-respecting? (Librem 5 story) - Physically destroying optional hardware that currently cannot be used without blobs, so users are not tempted to use those blobs, regardless of whether free alternatives might appear in the future (spoiler alert: they did) (Stallman trying to get bunnie to permanently disable the GPU in the Novena free hardware/software laptop to get certified).
- ece 5y agoYeah, that makes little sense. Ideally you would want to point users to documented hardware, running QMK, or other (potentially reversed engineered) open-firmware.