Actually, I don't know about his stance being 'unwavering'. The iconic story of why he got into the whole free software things to start with was because he wanted to modify the source code of a laser printer, which is surely not a general purpose computing device. He appears to have stepped away from arguing that he should have access to firmware... Either that or he thinks that firmware should be patentable, but that you should be allowed to freely modify and distribute it anyway, which kind of defeats the purpose of patenting it.