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Re: Changing how we handle non-free firmware



On Tue, 2022-08-23 at 19:57 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:

> My reading of that is that the FSF RYF program does not meet the needs
> of people who do not care about having a fully free software system.

My reading of it was the opposite, that the FSF RYF program doesn't
take into account the potential for reverse engineering of firmware and
in doing so it encourages locking down processors currently running
non-free firmware to ensure updates don't detrimentally affect users,
but that inadvertently prevents libre firmware from being created,
which Free Software advocates should agree is a suboptimal situation. 

While I understand the tradeoff of blocking updates to non-free
firmware, that also blocks libre firmware forever and I think that
just isn't something that Free Software advocates should support.

Personally I think the FSF RYF program should change their requirements
to require non-free firmware on secondary processors be able to be
upgraded, downgraded, modified, replaced or reverse engineered.
I think that some freedoms are better than zero freedoms here.

Alternatively, they could ban proprietary firmware and or hardware
altogether, but I don't think that the hardware industry is quite at
the point where this would be achievable nor help the situation.

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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