Hector Martin

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)"

"100% of PureOS is free software (required blobs not considered part of PureOS)" It's not "considered", it's a very clear and tangible boundary! Better analogy would be "this tofuburger is vegan, but the french fries next to it were fried on animal fats".

You can eat the tofuburger and not the fries. You can't run PureOS on your device without the blobs. Come on you can do better with your analogies.

The analogy is good enough already. You can simply take PureOS and run it on a blobless device and it'll be fully blob-free as a whole. There's no such blobless mobile device in existence yet, but that may change in the future.

Ah, so it's about hypothetically eating tofuburger, but you can't eat it now. Gotcha. Seriously...

Oh c'mon. The OS doesn't contain any blobs, so you know that if something is part of the OS, it is free - period. It is a valuable assumption to be able to make. In-hardware blobs aren't part of the OS, so it's clear to the user what's free and what's not.