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

[Daniel Kulesz]

 supported by coreboot
Message-Id: <20170206030901.a2ac00bcd93e316782a3e7c0 at googlemail.com>
X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.5.1 (GTK+ 2.24.31; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

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