FSF announces criteria for hardware endorsement program "Respects Your Freedom" | Hacker News Reader

FSF announces criteria for hardware endorsement program "Respects Your Freedom"

fsf.org

29 pointsZeroMinx20 comments

This will have little or no impact, as pretty much the only hardware vendors that will be interested are those whose hardware is of no interest to Windows or Mac users. Why? Because of requirements like these:

        Any product-related materials that mention the FSF
	endorsement must not also carry endorsements or
	badges related to proprietary software, such as
	"Works with Windows" or "Made for Mac" badges,
	because these would give an appearance of
	legitimacy to those products, and may make users
	think the product requires them. However, we don't
	object to clear factual statements informing the
	user that the product also works with specific
	proprietary operating systems.

and

        The seller must use FSF approved terminology for
	the FSF's activities and work, in all statements
	and publications relating to the product. This
	includes product packaging, and manuals, web pages,
	marketing materials, and interviews about the
	product. Specifically, the seller must use the term
	"GNU/Linux" for any reference to an entire
	operating system which includes GNU and Linux, and
	not mislead with "Linux" or "Linux-based system" or
	"a system with the Linux kernel". And the seller
	must talk about "free software" more prominently
	than "open source."

I'd be happy with a certification that something runs without proprietary drivers.

RMS uses a Lemote Yeeloong laptop for that very reason.

Of course it's made in a sweatshop but hey, software freedom trumps human rights any day of the week, right? Right?

Human rights? Working in a sweatshop beats being a farmer, which is what workers in those sweatshops would be doing if they weren't employed there or in places like them.

It probably beats being a subsistence farmer but farmers as a profession are often wealthy - look at France.

I really don't think anyone in china is going to be more wealthy if they choose farming over sweatshop work.

Possibly not, but shopping there is still perpetuating the sweatshop system. Why not buy a laptop made in Taiwan or South Korea where the people are free?

Because its usually better to give your money to someone who's desperately poor than to someone who's moderately poor, even if you give less money in the first case than in the second?

If you're arguing that South Korea and Taiwan are politically free and that its better to give money to democracies thats understandable. But its pernicious to think that giving a desperately poor person something which is far less than you could give makes you morally responsible for their plight, causing you to avoid helping them at all.

South Korea and Taiwan clawed their way up to being only sort of poor through working in sweatshops (and before them Japan did too), the sweatshop system is something we should actually be encouraging in the short term while we work on improving infrastructure and education in poor countries.

EDITED: 'if' to 'is'

Because you aren't giving your money to that person - you're giving it to "the system" which says, "hmm, this sweatshop business is great, let's go on doing that!".

You're anthropomorphizing here horribly. There's no entity called "The Sweatshop business" that sits around with an evil expression on his face plotting on how to make more sweatshops and taking my money, the system in only an abstraction for the wide variety of people, workers and capitalists, each with their own goals and desires that when taken together produce the things that we call sweatshops. This is important because if you are lazy and rely on anthropological reasoning ("I'm the sweatshop system, of course I want more sweatshops") you won't be able to make correct predictions about how the world will change in response to your actions.

Yes my money goes to a person. I hand off my money to the clerk at the store and then it travels around and eventually some of it goes to the suppliers of raw materials, some of it goes into the pockets of the capitalists who provided the funding, and some of it goes to pay the wages of yonder sweatshops workers.

Errm, not in China. They've got a centrally planned economy. There actually is someone who's figured out exactly the minimum conditions for workers to keep the foreign currency flowing. And RMS for all his talk of freedom is advocating propping that up.

In principle that's quite possible, but China hasn't had that sort of central planning for decades now. What China does do is use its redidency permit system to restrict many of the people who want to move to the cities from the countryside from doing so. This actually raises of the wages of Chinese workers from the $3-4 per day you'd expect given China's level of rural poverty up into the $5 per day range. If China were to become democratic of course there's no way the repressive residency system would last (that's what Item 8 of the Charter 08 is partially about) and the urban workers know this. Thus China tries to prevent democratic revolution (which tends to be urban) by coopting the urban workers.

EDIT: Edited a bit for clarity.

EDIT2: Actually, reading up on wikipedia it seems that most of the price controls weren't removed until the mid 90s, so I exaggerated when I said "decades". My bad.

And by god is it ugly.

Aren't all laptops made in "sweatshops"?

Also, there are plenty of activists talking about worker rights but few talking about software freedom, so RMS is probably better off doing what he's doing.

Are the FSF's endorsements really worth anything? How many people on HN are using an FSF endorsed linux distro? The full list is here: http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html Spoiler: Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian aren't on it.

What's the point of having such lists if they don't appear to exert any pressure on entities to change? (The aformentioned distributions seem in no hurry to move to compliance.)

What kind of pressure do you think they should exert?

They worked with Debian for years, but ultimately Debian didn't quite agree with their vision for total software freedom.

They don't actually weild any power with which they could apply pressure, so its a bit of a moot point. I guess I was calling their purpose, as expressed by their completely ignored list, into question. I know people say that there is value in RMS being out there campaigining for our freedoms, but, again, with this list as evidence, it seems like no one takes him seriously. The distributions doing the most to bring free software to the public are censured by the FSF instead of being embraced.

Obviously, this isn't entirely fair, and the FSF is very supportive to those popular distributions an supportive of your use of any free software. But this new list seems destined to be as useless as the first.

"The desire to own a computer or device and have full control over it, to know that you are not being spied on or tracked, to run any software you wish without asking permission, and to share with friends without worrying about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)..."

Yes, it's valuable to me, especially with the development of TPM hardware. I'd be greatful for trusted source like FSF to pre-screen hardware for those criteria so I don't have to dig through tech specs on Newegg, Amazon, and obfuscated manufacturer's websites trying to find it myself.

My point is that they already have a list of free operating systems, and pretty much nobody uses them. Do you think it likely that their list of free hardware will be more useful?

1. Depends what's on the list, how comoditized the items are, how interchangeable with non-Free hardware they are.

2. Actually testing its usefulness by putting it out there > speculating about it without actually seeing it.

3. Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it, especially if the cost of doing it is low. It could be the kind of sleeper project that just sits in a corner of the web until some calamity or inflection point comes along that suddenly puts Free hardware on everyone's radar.

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