Comment by marcan_42

I think Apple are a corporation with interests that happen to result in them building secure, high performance, quite trustable hardware. Since they have the motive to do so, and since everything I've seen suggests they indeed are, and since their hardware officially allows me to run my own software on it, I would much rather use their hardware (with my own OS/software) than whatever the FSF labels as RYF, which is a label that, in my view, says nothing I care about, not even about my freedom.

Whether Apple is ethical or not is a different question. There is plenty of criticism to be fired at them for various issues. That's a personal call for people to make. I'm not saying you should go buy Apple hardware. I'm saying it's significantly more trustworthy from a security and privacy standpoint than x86 machines. Do they respect my software freedom? About as much as the RYF machines. They both let me run my own OS and they both rely on proprietary firmware for various things. The FSF's certification criteria do nothing for my software freedom (which has nothing to do with whether blobs are in ROM or RAM), they just hurt security, which is something else I care about.

We all have to make our own decisions about what to purchase based on the information available to us. That is why having such information is so important. If you value repairability more than anything, you should probably get a Framework. If you value security above all, you should get a Precursor device. If you want a trustable machine that's still high performance, you should get a Mac. If you want to run Windows games, you should get a gaming PC. If you value your freedom... there isn't anything truly free out there. RYF machines certainly aren't it, nor more free than many others by practical measures, nor transparent about their design.

Hence why I criticize the program. It's not achieving anything positive. It's just a feel good thing; the FSF says it respects my freedom so I can feel good about being Free™ while running more proprietary firmware than many other off the shelf machines.

Just to put things into perspective, I believe Google have done more for computing device freedom than the FSF, because the Chromebook team is notoriously pretty much the only large team which actually pushes for open source everything pretty hard, and they're important enough that some vendors listen, and they have the money to develop things themselves. For example, if you look for an open boot/OS stack for the Tegra X1, the closest you're going to get is the Chromebook Pixel's. Only the RAM training blob is closed source (and there is a reverse engineered replacement these days). Everything from the low level bootloader to the GPU drivers are open. This is no thanks to Nvidia - for pretty much all other customers they offer proprietary bootloaders. Also, I'm pretty sure some Chromebooks even have open source EC firmware, which those ThinkPads the FSF loves so much don't.