They're referring to the FSF's "Respects Your Freedoms" programme, a frankly absurd specification that encourages vendors to lock down closed source firmware in

They're referring to the FSF's "Respects Your Freedoms" programme, a frankly absurd specification that encourages vendors to lock down closed source firmware into ROM rather than actually make it free. RYF doesn't care about the hardware designs themselves being open (no computer would qualify in that case), so they treat closed-source firmware ROM images as identical to closed-source hardware, which is fine. But store that firmware on some sort of RAM, or flashable ROM, and all of a sudden it's now closed-source firmware, which is bad. The end result is that systems that are the most locked down are those which "Respects Your Freedoms".