Hector Martin

Why? Why is that important to you? Do you get digital cooties if you touch a blob? Not running blobs on the main CPU has practical advantages. Not *touching* blobs with the main CPU serves no purpose. That's just FSF religious nonsense.

It's about clear boundaries. 100% of PureOS is free software, with all the user freedom benefits it brings. If it had non-free repos with blobs, it wouldn't be true anymore. And introducing blobs into OS for devices that could very well embed it themselves is not worth it.

Sure, the blob is still there. But so are the blobs in all the other microcontrollers there that were already self-contained. Why make the OS "99% free plus some blobs" when you control the hardware it runs on and can maintain that boundary?

Because the boundary isn't doing anything for the user. It's religious. What blobs you run has practical consequences. What blobs you touch with the CPU doesn't. The FSF has built a narrative that touching blobs is bad, and the tradeoffs to implement it hurt users.

"100% of PureOS is free software (required blobs not considered part of PureOS)" "100% of this burger is gluten-free (burger definition excludes the buns)" "100% of this car is electric (combustion engine required to drive hybrid powertrain is a separate purchase)"

This nonsense means I can take an off the shelf computer with an Nvidia GPU, build some horrible hack so that the UEFI steals CPU core #0 (the boot CPU) and runs Nvidia's driver on it with an API, bootstraps the main OS on the other cores, and now it Respects Your Freedom.

Look ma, the application CPUs never touched blobs! You can run 100% free software on it! It's the freest computer ever! With high performance graphics! Do you realize how ridiculous this is?

Heck if I did it the Purism way, all I'd have to do is have an open firmware that bootstraps an open loader on an aux core that gets isolated by UEFI, which then itself loads the blob from the VBIOS flash that the card already has. Yay, RYF Nvidia machine.