Roadmap to freedom

If you already made the mistake of buying a computer that will only function if you feed it wiht your non-Free Software and your freedom, now you'll know that you and everyone else is missing essential freedoms and everything else this entails, including the benefits of a community helping improve the functioning of the device. (if you've ever found any program that does absolutely everything you want, everything you'll ever want, and do that just the perfect way for you, you may throw the first rock)

And then, once you know it, since you value freedom and the benefits it brings with it, you'll avoid making the same mistake next time.

The more people do that, the more pressure we, the community you and I are part of, will be making for vendors to respect us and our freedom. Pressure that matters for them, because, remember, we won't be making the same mistakes again, i.e., as you put it, we'll be voting with our wallets, not buying from vendors who treat us like dirt, which is something the announcement goes into as well.

Under this kind of pressure, the vendors might choose to continue down that path, and sell less and less, or do the little work it takes to respect our freedom, in which case they will sell to happy customers.

And it doesn't matter much how long the chain of distribution is. If we make pressure on those who want to sell to us, they will take care of transferring the pressure to their suppliers, and so on, until it gets to whoever can set the bits Free. And, if they don't, their direct customer will just pick another supplier: they won't keep on buying stuff that their own customers are not willing to buy.

That's the path set to recover freedom for all, so that we can all benefit. Refraining from giving positive feedback to the misbehavior is key, and awareness is key to accomplish that, and avoiding trivial and transparent functioning of devices that take your freedom away is key to raise awareness. This is how Linux-libre accomplishes that. See?, it's not that hard to understand.

Sure, it's a plan that requires cooperation from lots of people, it at times even requires making some sacrifices, but small ones, compared with what we have to gain if we succeed, and even smaller ones compared with sacrifices made for freedom throughout history.