Intel's "redundant prefix issue"

Posted Nov 21, 2023 10:45 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Intel's "redundant prefix issue" by paulj
Parent article: Intel's "redundant prefix issue"

> but shooting for the moon with the original policy may still have been the right policy at that time.

No. RYF certification arrived in 2012. By that time it was much too late. GPLv3 fiasco was well underway. So FSF knew it's influence is pretty limited. And, worse, hardware manufacturers have already changed their development model to incorporate upgradeable firmware (that happened around the beginning of XX century, I remember how I bought the same Socket 370 motherboard in different revisions and while original one had “flash write enable” pins and one v2.0 it was no longer there… means MSI tech support complained enough that it was removed).

Yes, it was an interesting attempt to turn the tide (same as GPLv3), but at some point sane person would realize that it failed and would change the stance.

Right now FSF is fighting Paraguayan War and while it loses not lives buy “only” a mindshare consequences are dire: from someone who was respected and had lots of allies (even if not allies agreed on everything) they turned into someone who is not ignored entirely in the mainstream IT field only because it holds copyright for some important projects and you couldn't fix bug in these projects without assigning copyright to FSF. And even that chokehold is slowly eroding.

Intel's "redundant prefix issue"

Posted Nov 21, 2023 14:19 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

> And, worse, hardware manufacturers have already changed their development model to incorporate upgradeable firmware

There are other forces at work here. Since devices sold to the public must have a two years warranty, if any serious bugs are found (as they will) the manufacturer has to fix it and given the choice between pushing a software update and replacing the device, the former is much cheaper. And additionally, pushing a update reduces the amount of electronic waste, for which there are also regulations.

Changes afoot making it harder to disclaim warranty for security issues in software is only going to accelerate this trend.

Intel's "redundant prefix issue"

Posted Nov 21, 2023 14:37 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

These are minor details. Of course hardware manufacturers have changed their development model to save money! That's what businesses do.

And if you understand that then the next question that you should ask is: how may they earn some money from getting that RYF mark?

Taking existing hardware with proprietary firmware, crippling it and selling it at higher prices is profitable.

Developing hardware and open firmware just to get RYF mark is not.

It's as simple as that.

Now, you may play with these rules, try to make it more profitable for hardware manufacturers to use your free software instead of writing your own software (that's how Linux have become indispensable).

And then, when certain classes of devices would become available with free firmware — you may demand these these have to come with free firmware.

Or you may just ignore Goodhart's law and get the opposite of what you are trying to achieve.

I can understand why FSF doesn't want to change rules of GPL: it's hard and costly to do and often backfires. But “certification marks”? It's completely normal for the certification mark rules to change over time, it's more-or-less inevitable because of Goodhart's law!

Yet FSF acts as if it may design something that works once and for all. Worse: it believes that precisely ignorance of economics would help them to achieve their goals, somehow.