You're saying that, and yet even Leah Rowe is sick of that.

Also, try not to take my words out of context. We're talking specifically about the project mentioned in the article. Tell me, what value has canoeboot and GNU boot provides?

Coming from a (pragmatic) fan of GNU projects.

You are right that the tone was a little insulting.

That said, who is the “us” that you are referring to?

A lot of Open Source software is written by people that would not see the use of non-free components for testing as a problem. A lot of Open Source software is written by people that believe in the superiority of collaborative software development but do not have strong opinions on user freedom. The may ever value developer freedom in ways that is incompatible with the most extreme or idealist views of user freedom.

Are you demanding recognition to “us” for all that software?

The post you are replying to was unnecessarily combative. Your is no better and is supported by no better moral high-ground.

Stallman is often batshit insane, but when it comes to tech he knows what he's saying.

I would trust a doctor when he says about something about my stomach, I wouldn't trust them about astrophysics.

I would trust Stallman about how computers can be misused and mistreated, same as Cory Doctorow. I wouldn't trust both about a small part of history, unless it was obvious or very well cited.

Not in this case, the tests they're running doesn't need the vendor blobs in those testing folders.

Generally I agree with Debians changes to include nonfree firmware in the default images and making the "completely free" images the non-default version. I do think maintaining and having completely free distro versions to be a good thing though.

The whole situation is really unnecessary because none of the things that we're testing really requires those vendor blobs.
We're just testing the basic vboot and CBFS structures in those images, the file contents are not really relevant as long as they match the signatures.
So I think the easiest option here is to just remove the offending CBFS files from those images / overwrite the offending FMAP sections with zeroes.

issuetracker.google.com/issues…

That question is kind a rabbit hole and not one I feel confident in going down.

Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
The real world implications of non-free software is that other's can't run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

I like having computing alternatives that are free from corporate control and believe that the hardliners like FSF helps us keep those alternatives alive. I realise that those alternatives are in many ways worse and that a lot of hardware today requires the vendor blobs to work. When/If corporations push their control even further I want those alternatives to be around.

And you really should pay for winrar.

I believe that both proprietary non-free systems and fully free systems can exist and that having licensing alternatives like GPL, LGPL and MIT gives the developer options for specifying how their software is to be used.

The movement towards using MIT or LGPL instead of the full GPL for libraries thus allowing the developers using the libraries the freedom to choose what license their software should use is one I can stand behind.

If someone builds a FLOSS turbotax competitor and don't want anyone to use their hard work and fork it into a commercial and proprietary product then I believe there should be a license for that.
If they rather earn money from it and copyrights their code instead that is also their prerogative.
The middle-ground where they create a free turbotax competitor with a license that allows others to fork it into a proprietary software should also be possible - although I personally don't see the allure.