[Arm-netbook] FSF: Respects Your Freedom hardware product certification

[Henrik Nordström]

tor 2012-10-11 klockan 13:25 +0100 skrev Gordan Bobic:

> This is pretty philosophical, but in the interest of pragmatism I don't 
> see anything wrong with using a cheaper/better SoC of which some part 
> isn't FSF endorsable, and simply dropping any marketing of the 
> non-FSF-endorsable features. It has a GPU. The GPU isn't supported. You 
> don't have to use it. The important thing is to package it up so it is 
> all perfectly usable with a serial console, a-la Kirkwood.

Well, we do have full open source for HDMI+LCD+TV output on A10, and
even 2D acceleration (just no accelerated X11 driver for it). No need to
go console only.

The question to ask FSF is if it is possible to get certified with a
product that contains unsupported (and unused) parts, provided you don't
market or endorse those parts.  IIRC this is possible. Can't see
anything in the crierias listed on
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/criteria that would be an
issue really.

But with two of those parts in the A10 being the GPU and VPU users are
likely to go running about grabbing proprietary software for those which
is not desireable from free software perspective, even if  Rhombus-Tech
do not include any proprietary software for those components or endorse
any usage of such proprietary software.

There is plenty of other modules in tha A10 CPU for which there is no
open source drivers. But the VPU and GPU is very noticeable.

Regards
Henrik