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Re:I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro by mindslight on Saturday November 20, 2021 @11:09AM (#29289284)
It's not productive to call it "arbitrary religious dogma". The FSF chose a criteria for what binary blobs are acceptable. Your and my opinions are that they set this criteria wrong, but if we hope to change their policy, then we have to discuss it rationally.

I personally think the correct criteria is that of security boundaries and change control. If I've got a graphics card with proprietary code (regardless of whether its in ROM or loaded into RAM), with a proper IOMMU, the attacks it can perform on me are limited (eg TEMPEST). The video card itself is not Free or secure, but it's unfortunately something I have to use to interface with my Free/secure computer, just like my keyboard with its proprietary firmware. And as long as I can load any version of firmware onto that video card, then I retain administrative control where the manufacturer can't revoke functionality after I've purchased it.

Disk drives with proprietary software (which is all of them) are not an attack vector, because a drive should only ever be seeing encrypted data to begin with (eg LUKS).

A network card is a bit more worrisome with its direct network access (ie backhaul), but a Free/secure design shouldn't be trusting the network either (unless you have Free/secure switches), so this does not meaningfully change your security properties.

Obviously the above assumes Free/secure drivers, because drivers are running inside the security boundary of the OS.

CPU masks and microcode run afoul of my strict criteria, but are practically inescapable. Proprietary masks/microcode are required for every amd64 system (correct me if I am wrong), so it makes sense to say you have a Free/secure amd64 modulo those proprietary bits (as say Libreboot already does). And with so few versions of CPU microcode, the question of whether to trust a given microcode update is equivalent to whether to trust a given newly released CPU, and shouldn't be viewed as a software Freedom issue.

Re:I Love Arch, but GNU Guix Is My New Distro by marcan_42 on Saturday November 20, 2021 @10:15PM (#29293881)
The problem is that they have long given up on rationality; they and their devoted followers are an echo chamber of "blobs bad", "my software freedom", etc. They've stopped listening to rational discussion :(