Hector Martin

Reading up on the @Puri_sm Librem 5. Nice idea, but it's a damn shame they're using the @FSF RYF certification as a goal and to guide the development process. RYF is total nonsense that encourages *decreasing* user freedom.

A 100% blob-free, Libre world would be nice. Unfortunately, that is not an achievable goal today. The FSF knows this. The solution they came up with? Make sure the user can't *see* any of the proprietary firmware. As long as they don't see it, nobody will complain. Brilliant.

So RYF has a "secondary processor exception". Which basically means that as long as proprietary firmware is stored separately from the Free™ part, and you can't touch it, and you're firewalled from it, Everything Is Peachy.

This is, of course, total crap. A device that respects user freedom is a device that *allows* the user to modify proprietary firmware, that *exposes* exactly what proprietary firmware is there, and that *encourages* reverse engineering to produce a Free version.

What *I* want is hardware with exactly as much proprietary firmware to make it practical (and no more), where all of it is in /lib/firmware (or equivalent). No secret flash memories. I can mess and reverse engineer it all. This is the exact opposite of what the FSF encourages.

Of course, you still want to be firewalled from devices using proprietary firmware wherever possible (in the form of interfaces that are secure, e.g. no free memory read/write from the blob), but that has nothing to do with not allowing the free side to send the blob over.

But RYF instead says you must hide and bury any firmware you end up having to have. And so @Puri_sm end up having to do utter nonsense, like using a secondary CPU core to load the DDR4 controller firmware into the hardware, just so they can claim the binary blob is elsewhere.