Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 11:23 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Perfection is the enemy of good by farnz
Parent article: The FSF's Librephone project

Because the RMA has a cost to the manufacturer and the cost is hopefully enough to push the manufacturer to a fully user-serviceable stack. And once the RMA is paid for the manufacturer could just as well swap parts. You talk like RMAs have no cost manufacturer-side, they are quite expensive to organise, they are a competitive disadvantage.

Is it ideal ? No. Like all non profits the FSF is more constrained than the legislator.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 12:31 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

RMAs are free to the manufacturer - the FSF's RYF-approved vendors do, IME, just charge the cost to the end user for servicing the firmware, to the point where it's normally cheaper to throw away a perfectly working device and buy a new one from them than it is to get them to service the firmware.

Why does the FSF want to lock things down so that users cannot service firmware themselves, nor can they have Free firmware, but instead are tied to paying the vendor for servicing events?

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 13:23 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

Some years ago I made a proposal to amend the RYF criteria to require some free freedoms from firmware. They weren't accepted yet, but IIRC the FSF hasn't yet hired someone to look after the RYF program, maybe it would happen after that.

https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Free_Software_Foundati...

I proposed that the FSF:

Change the criteria to require non-free firmware on secondary processors be able to be upgraded, downgraded, locally modified, replaced or reverse engineered. One way to see this is that some freedoms are better than zero freedoms.

Change the criteria to require that free software running on the main processors must be protected from modifications by non-free firmware on secondary processors, through the use of an IOMMU or similar technology.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 22:20 UTC (Wed) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link]

> Change the criteria to require that free software running on the main processors must be protected from modifications by non-free firmware on secondary processors, through the use of an IOMMU or similar technology.
That is surprisingly hard on quite a few processors (yes, in the x86 space as well as the ARM space and elsewhere) unless you move the free software into a secure enclave (which usually has its own share of non-free blobs needed to run the free software).

While your additional requirement is useful from a freedom perspective, it is desperately needed from a security perspective.