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

[luke.leighton]

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 9:17 PM, Henrik Nordström
<henrik at henriknordstrom.net> wrote:
> 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.

 it's not.  i've asked (and confirmed again, only last week).

> 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,

 precisely.  dr stallman pointed out to me that the temptation for
people to install proprietary software is simply too great when there
is no alternative, and the functionality is *necessary* i.e. it
degrades the quality of the user's experience.

 this is why i'm gently pushing icubecorp, because theirs is a
general-purpose processor capable of stunning 3D and Video processing.
 for a 28nm IC they need to raise about $USD 5m for the TSMC mask
charges, and a little bit more to license hard macros such as SATA,
RGMII, HDMI and so on.

 l.