Re: [coreboot] Proposal: "Freedom level" field for boards

[Daniel Kulesz]

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Hi Timothy,
> I have taken much of the feedback received into account, and revised the
> freedom level categories at
> https://www.coreboot.org/Board_freedom_levels somewhat.  Specifically,
> the "Pwned" category is now factually stated as "Vendor Controlled", and
> the EC exception in the Silver category was removed, among other minor
> tweaks.
>
> These changes had the effect of demoting all Lenovo laptops to Bronze,
> and promoting the ASUS C201 (Google Veyron) to Gold.  I am still not
> 100% sure that I like the Veyron at Gold status due to the WiFi
> controller, but I will accept it for now pending introduction of
> libre-friendly (firmware-free or HW enforced radio limits with libre
> firmware) WiFi chipsets.
>
> Comments welcome!

Generally, I like this revised version. Some minor suggestions:

- if you stress the word "require" in the "vendor controlled" section, I would suggest to stress the words "require absolutely no" and "require some" in the above sections.
- the forecast "No amount of reverse engineering or hacking will ever allow a fully libre firmware to execute on these boards." sounds too much like a fact and too pesimistic to me to. Although it reflects the current state of what we know, I would be careful with making such "absolute" forecasts.
- the term "pwned" is still in the introduction.
- I would mention in the introduction that  this is a classification for Coreboot-supported boards, not one for boards in general. This is not really clear from the introduction. Therefore, I would also state "All coreboot-supported AMD hardware" and so on in the vendor-controlled section.
- the term "libre software operating system" is sort of fuzzy, especially as you take into account operating systems which ship kernels that contain non-free components (at least the FSF claims that).

Cheers, Daniel

Proposal: "Freedom level" field for boards

On 02/05/2017 09:09 PM, Daniel Kulesz via coreboot wrote:
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>
> Hi Timothy,
> > I have taken much of the feedback received into account, and revised the
> > freedom level categories at
> > https://www.coreboot.org/Board_freedom_levels somewhat.  Specifically,
> > the "Pwned" category is now factually stated as "Vendor Controlled", and
> > the EC exception in the Silver category was removed, among other minor
> > tweaks.
> >
> > These changes had the effect of demoting all Lenovo laptops to Bronze,
> > and promoting the ASUS C201 (Google Veyron) to Gold.  I am still not
> > 100% sure that I like the Veyron at Gold status due to the WiFi
> > controller, but I will accept it for now pending introduction of
> > libre-friendly (firmware-free or HW enforced radio limits with libre
> > firmware) WiFi chipsets.
> >
> > Comments welcome!
>
> Generally, I like this revised version. Some minor suggestions:
> if you stress the word "require" in the "vendor controlled" section, I would suggest to stress the words "require absolutely no" and "require some" in the above sections.
> the forecast "No amount of reverse engineering or hacking will ever allow a fully libre firmware to execute on these boards." sounds too much like a fact and too pesimistic to me to. Although it reflects the current state of what we know, I would be careful with making such "absolute" forecasts.
> the term "pwned" is still in the introduction.
> I would mention in the introduction that  this is a classification for Coreboot-supported boards, not one for boards in general. This is not really clear from the introduction. Therefore, I would also state "All coreboot-supported AMD hardware" and so on in the vendor-controlled section.
> the term "libre software operating system" is sort of fuzzy, especially as you take into account operating systems which ship kernels that contain non-free components (at least the FSF claims that).
>
> Cheers, Daniel

Yeah with tens of millions of dollars and a crack team of the best 
hardware engineers in the world I guess you could figure out how to make 
libre firmware boot on a new intel board.

Same as, if you put down a few trillion dollars to do it you could 
colonize mars and have daily commercial flights within the next decade.

So by that standard saying "possible" legitimizes the purism types who 
think that a tiny company that buys quanta laptops is going to some how 
pull it off, it makes people beat a dead x86 horse.

For all intensive purposes it is impossible, the only new libre firmware 
*capable* performance choice at this point is POWER.