Hector Martin

What you're saying is they came up with this stupid idea *first*, *then* added a PD controller that needed flash anyway so *now* it's slightly less of a stupid idea. Too bad doesn't change the fact that the initial idea was still very stupid :-)

Also, they originally said it was going to be read only, but I assume they gave up on that (the WP pin is deasserted and I assume they don't blow the "WP forever" OTP bit via software in the flash chip at manufacturing time)

Anyway, loading proprietary firmware from the eMMC image is a *feature*, because it means that it can be validated together with the rest of the OS. If you have firmware out of band, you need to perform explicit steps to verify that it hasn't been tampered with.

It's also, you know, less wasted work. There is zero user benefit to doing this stupid dance to get RYF certification; it's purely a bureaucratic hack that does nothing for user freedom, just panders to the FSF's clearly nonsensical rules.

Even assuming that it has no benefit for the user (which I disagree with), a "bureaucratic hack that does nothing for user freedom" is very clearly a different thing than "eliminating user freedom".

I disagree with "no benefit" because being able to just take and flash free distributions without having to include blobs/enable non-free repos is a thing that directly benefits the user. I was porting SHR to N900 back in the day and I really wished it had its blobs stored too.

We ended up including an initial setup page that pointed users to instructions on how to copy the blobs from Maemo installation. Not having to deal with such bullshit and being able to just install things like Debian without contrib/non-free is definitely an advantage for me.

Notice that this is exactly the PureOS case - there's no non-free stuff in PureOS repos at all (like Debian main). That flash is IMO a very practical thing to have for a hackable FLOSS-oriented device. And worst case you just won't use it if you don't care.