

FSF announces criteria for hardware endorsement program "Respects Your Freedom" - ZeroMinx
http://www.fsf.org/news/endorsement-criteria

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tzs
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."

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

~~~
gaius
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?

~~~
Symmetry
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.

~~~
gaius
It probably beats being a _subsistence farmer_ but farmers as a profession are
often wealthy - look at France.

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

~~~
gaius
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?

~~~
Symmetry
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'

~~~
gaius
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!".

~~~
Symmetry
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.

~~~
gaius
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.

~~~
Symmetry
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.

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macrael
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.)

~~~
SkyMarshal
_"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.

~~~
macrael
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?

~~~
SkyMarshal
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.

