Also, please omit inflammatory swipes like your "Edit", which also badly broke more than one of the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them? We're really trying to avoid this sort of hell to the extent possible.
The quest for freedom is, of course, an idealistic one. The important thing is that, in their fight to promote freedom, they meet obstacles. Those friction points reveal the lack of freedom. And so, although they don't reach freedom, they actually show that freedom is limited.
IOW, refusing the statu quo is one of the way to change it.
You should look at history and look at how much freedom you have, how much protection you have, etc. and then ask yourself : where does it come from ?
And yet they aren't changing it. The FSF has had exactly zero success in changing the direction the world is moving in with regards to firmware and deep proprietary integration.
In fact, they've done very little for freedom in the past 10-20 years; most of the real breakthroughs have come from much more pragmatic people, such as those developing reverse engineered open source drivers for complex hardware like GPUs.
The FSF shows you how much freedom you lack according to their own bizarre definition of freedom... and then does amazingly little to actually improve your freedom.
Whose efforts get completely circumvented through employment of cryptographic firmware signing, which gate keeps necessary functionality out of said pragmatist's reach.
Well said. If problems are not openly demonstrated and complained about, things will not improve.
Game theoretic behaviour in society that has advanced beyond zero sum.
Same goes for reasonable approach to FOSS, like Marcan is doing himself vs the cult and the arbitrary zero tolerance rules.
Then they spin narratives about how this is important for not just freedom, but also security/privacy/etc, while their policies have absolutely nothing to do with improving users' security or privacy, as is made evident by the linux-libre issue, among many others. Actual assessment of the privacy/security impact of proprietary firmware on users is a much more nuanced topic, but the FSF are not interested in nuance, they just say "blobs (that you can see) bad".
The people criticizing the FSF here act as if Stallman were wrong about these issues because he said it back then already. While in reality again and again he was right about how user freedoms are limited when the principles he outlined are not followed.
To give Intel a way to distribute closed source software updates to your processor is definitely a security risk. And we know for certain the actors in the USA that try to use those security risks for their surveillance programs. Don't act like this world does not exist.
> By withholding that information they are effectively eliminating the choice, and restricting users' freedom.
You are mixing up agency and software freedom, it's clear that you won't see eye to eye with the FSF as long as you do so.
I'm not even vigorously defending not showing the note about existing firmware updates, if Guix really does so. I'd prefer a note. Just what it would mean and how problematic closed firmware would be seemed like it needed a clarification here.
That is not what linux-libre is doing/refusing to do. What linux-libre is doing is censoring a message to their users that their microcode is out of date and their CPU has security vulnerabilities. They could've just left that in and let users make the choice whether to manually install the microcode updates or not.
> You are mixing up agency and software freedom
Agency is more important than software freedom. The FSF's problem is precisely their blind focus on "software freedom" when the definition of "software" can't even be precisely defined any more, to the detriment of everything else that affects users.
your refusal to accept FSFs right to adhere to its principles is bordering on the extreme. yet you constantly lob insults toward them as an organization. it does not help your points at all. they obviously hold different values to you. i think FSF is ok as long as they are clear about what they are doing and they are not trying to trick anyone. you have done absolutely nothing to demonstate otherwise in this whole exchange and instead you keep slinging FUD. i will repeat my question that i have asked so many times: has GNU or FSF anywhere claimed that they take a security-centric approach? as far as i know they have always taken a free-software approach. that they refuse to bend their principles to infantile screams is a big plus in my books
i think i have always held the opinion that for FSF and GNU their concept of security was "security through free software". that is free software (according to how its understood by them) comes first
IIRC Stallman criticized Ubuntu for collecting users' search info by default-- something they used to do[1].
It's unfortunate to see a call to nuance paired with an exaggerated claim that is so easily disproven.
But since reality doesn't care about their refusal to adapt, and they can't just throw their hands up in the air and say nothing is free any more and you should just live off the grid and reject all technology, they instead have built a deliberately obtuse set of rules to declare certain things out of scope, so they can maintain the illusion of freedom for their followers while making concessions behind the scenes (and even actively working with manufacturers to devise silly workarounds that fit into that framework, see e.g. the Librem 5's ridiculous secondary CPU core and external flash dance so they can claim the RAM training blob doesn't make their device non-free).
Then they're very careful to never talk about this unless prompted; the fewer people know about all these secret blobs they're running anyway, the better. It's basically cult-like behavior - this kind of control of the information and narrative that followers get is a defining characteristic.
None of this helps users, of course; what would help users would be being informed about not just exactly what blobs exist, but what the risks are, how they might affect their privacy and security, what update options exist, and whether they can be audited or replaced with free versions in the future. But the FSF doesn't care about any of that. They just want to pretend they live in a blob-free utopia.
Edit: Ah, the downvotes have started. I guess the FSF fans have showed up. I hope you're not using an off the shelf mouse to click on the downvote button; those all run proprietary USB HID firmware.