Conill: the FSF’s relationship with firmware is harmful to free software users

Ariadne Conill writesabout the FSF's policy toward proprietary firmware and, specifically,the rules for "Respects Your Freedom"certification.

Purism was able to accomplish this by making the Librem 5 have notone, but two processors: when the phone first boots, it uses asecondary CPU as a service processor, which loads all of therelevant blobs (such as those required to initialize the DDR4memory) before starting the main CPU and shutting itself off. Inthis way, they could have all the blobs they needed to use, withouthaving to worry about them being user visible from PureOS. Underthe policy, that left them free and clear for certification.

This is not a new story; see Papering over abinary blob from 2011, for example.