Here is the FSF Ethical Tech Giving Guide for this year (2024), which is released on an annual basis:
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Looks like a Shame for FSF to be honest. = (
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What is exactly is shameful for the FSF?
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The Librem 5 was last mentioned in v12, along with the PinePhone, which was approximately three years ago in 2021:
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I’d say it’s a saddeningly short list - and I’m not sure if it’s due to lack of FSF stuff of that the list is not made comprehensive. Was it lazy?
Purism is mentioned (with Pine64). See under " Promising Communities & Companies", Seems more like a broadening from L5 to other available stuff.
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The Vikings D8 from last year was switched with the USB Desktop Microphone this year, so there is not a Personal Computers category for v15.
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The FSF has backed itself into a corner on hardware. The only laptops it can recommend buying are ancient Thinkpads manufactured in 2008-9 (X200, T400 and T500) with Coreboot Libreboot.org GNU Boot installed. It can’t recommend a single tablet or mobile phone, so it excludes 64% of the world’s web browsing which now happens on mobile devices.
The v15 guide points to the Replicant project which is equally out of date. The last Replicant release (6.0 0004) was in June 2022 and is based on AOSP 6 released in Sept. 2015. The most recent hardware it runs on is the Samsung Galaxy S3 4G manufactured in 2012. The v15 guide provides links to Purism and Pine64, but makes no recommendations about specific hardware, which is frankly wrongheaded, because there are big differences between the relative freedom of different devices being sold by Pine64 and Purism.
Likewise, there are no longer any desktop PCs that the FSF can recommend, now that Vikings and Technoethical have run out of old ASUS KCMA-D8 and ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboards to install Coreboot. It isn’t surprising that there is no old stock left, considering that ASUS released the D8/D16 boards back in June 2017.
I guess that you can still build a desktop PC using Raptor Computing’s Talos II motherboards, but it is questionable how much longer Rapter will be able to keep selling those, because they need Power9 CPUs that were first released in 2017 and were superseded by Power10 CPUs in 2021. I’m guessing that Raptor Computing stockpiled Power9 CPUs, because they are no longer being manufactured and IBM can’t get anymore of them from GlobalFoundries due to the ongoing lawsuits between the two companies. However, the cheapest workstation that Raptor currently sells is the Basic Talos™ II Bundle (Single CPU), which costs $4869 and the cheaper Talos II Lite motherboard is currently out of stock.
I have always thought that the FSF’s RYF for hardware is pointless, because it is a binary Yes/No certification that doesn’t acknowledge that modern hardware needs proprietary firmware updates for proper security and bug fixing and there are many components where FOSS firmware simply isn’t available. For example, the only FOSS firmware for a cellular modem (that I know of) is Biktorigj’s The Modem Distro for the Quectel EG25-G, but that only replaces the proprietary Linux system and doesn’t include the essential cellular baseband firmware. Many CPUs, including the i.MX 8M and Power10, use Synopsys’s DDR RAM PHY which needs proprietary firmware to set the memory timing.
So far only Purism and Raptor Computing have tried to work with the FSF to get RYF certification for a new computer (if we can consider a phone a computer). Purism failed with the Librem 5/Liberty and Raptor Computing can’t boot a Power10 CPU without proprietary firmware, so both companies have hit dead ends. I doubt any other company will try to design new hardware for RYF in the future if it is complete computing system, and not just a component or accessory.
The only solution that I see is for the FSF to acknowledge that the binary RYF certification doesn’t work with today’s hardware and move to a scoring system, so people can judge the relative freedom, and that scoring system should include the hardware, and not just the firmware. The Librem 5/Liberty whose board schematics come with a GPL license should score higher than the PinePhone which publishes proprietary board schematics, and both should score higher than all the other mobile phones on the market that don’t publish any schematics.
Under the current system, no hardware seller has any reason to bother working with the FSF, and frankly, nobody should bother buying RYF hardware, because it doesn’t serve most people’s needs and isn’t judging the relative freedom of hardware by a reasonable standard. The current RYF certification also provides no incentive or way to pressure the hardware industry to make freer devices in the future. If all you are selling is refurbished devices that were manufactured years ago, hardware sellers have no leverage with chip manufacturers to try to convince them to not include components that require proprietary firmware or ask them to provide FOSS firmware or documentation so FOSS firmware can be created. As designers of new hardware, Purism and Raptor Computing can at least make requests to NXP and IBM, but refurbished resellers like Vikings and Technoethical have zero ability to talk to component makers and they can’t design hardware that avoids the problematic components, so we get no advancement in freedom over time.
The big problem that I see is that as computing moves increasingly away from X86 to ARM, we are going to lose more and more software freedom over time. Some device makers have decided to lock the bootloader (e.g. all Huawei devices and Apple A-series SoC’s) so the user can’t install an alternative operating system, and many require cumbersome procedures to gain permission to unlock the bootloader (e.g. Motorola and Xiaomi), and others require unauthorized hacks (e.g. Samsung). Others don’t release enough information so that another operating system can be installed (e.g. most devices with UNISOC and MediaTek SoC’s), and the vast majority of ARM devices use proprietary drivers that the community can’t update and won’t work with newer kernels.
In other words, we are going to be facing a massive loss in software freedom as most people move their computing to ARM devices in the future, so we really do need a functioning hardware certification that encourages hardware companies to sell devices that don’t restrict freedom. We desperately need an organization that tells people what ARM devices are better to buy in terms of user freedom, but none of the organizations (FSF, OSI, Linux Foundation, etc.) are bothering. Just publishing lists of which devices allow the user to unlock the bootloader, which devices support a FOSS bootloader and which devices have a FOSS OS available would help people make better buying decisions. Maybe it should be a community project to document these things, but something needs to be done.
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A small nitpick: FSF requires Libreboot, not coreboot. The difference is important for the freedom, as the former has no proprietary blobs while the latter does.
I agree with your other points though.
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Both Libreboot and Coreboot are FOSS now which are not endorsed by FSF.
FOSS is Evil
FOSS is not GNU
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At FSF, our current standard is ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboards with AMD 6200 series CPUs released in 2012. For the BIOS, we install Libreboot, the easy-to-install, 100% free software replacement for proprietary BIOS/boot programs, or a version of Coreboot that is carefully built to avoid including any nonfree blobs.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/closing-in-on-fully-free-bioses-with-the-fsf-tech-team
Perhaps FSF are also evil? 
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Libreboot was Free Software until Autum 2022, so the blog it righ, then Libreboot changed to FOSS by integrating BLOBs everywhere, so FSF removed Libreboot.
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Interesting. Link for others: From Freedom Trail to free boot and free farms: Charting the course at LibrePlanet day two — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software
During Denis “GNUtoo” Carikli’s talk “Taking control over the means of production: Free software boot,” a fork of Libreboot was announced. This fork, published at https://libreboot.at/, has been created to restore software freedom by removing nonfree binary blobs.
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And considering that, as far as I know, VoLTE didn’t exist in 2012, or at least wasn’t rolled out yet, recommending old Replicant devices as viable substitutes for modern spy-phones is disingenuous, or at least misinformed. VoLTE is, or soon will be, required everywhere, except maybe in some developing nations.
Never mind the fact that Samsungs (old and new) lose VoLTE capabillity anyway whenever a custom ROM is installed.
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@fsflover, yes I should have said Libreboot and not Coreboot. I updated my post to reflect that info.
@carlosgonz, Thanks for the clarification on what is happening with Libreboot. I was unaware that Libreboot.org now includes proprietary firmware and that a Libreboot.at fork had been created.
In some ways the world is getting better in terms of freedom. The RISC-V instruction set has appeared and there are people publishing free/open source code for RISC-V processors that anyone is free to implement. The cost of creating custom hardware getting cheap enough that companies like PINE64 and Purism can exist to cater to people who care about freedom. However, the future looks very dark when we consider the plight of the average person in the future. Most people are going to be using locked down computing devices, which only allow the device to run what the manufacturer or seller wants them to run, and many of those devices are going to be based on user data harvesting (i.e. Surveillance Capitalism). It is not a future that I relish. Sadly, I also foresee many companies like SiFive designing RISC-V chips which are just as bad as many of today’s ARM chips which require binary blobs in order to function.
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Here FSF mentions Purism as needing “help of developers or technical users in crossing the freedom finish line to full acceptability”:
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VoLTE is losing on custom roms because VoLTE on Qualcomms and Etc SOCs it need volte-BLOBs vendor on userland, however some modem is including VoLTE BLOBs on rootland like Librem 5, Pinephone so in this way customs rooms do not lose VoLTE.
Sorry my inglish i know. : )
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Right, so old Samsungs running Replicant should not be recommended. Well, they can potentially still communicate with messaging apps, just not with phone calls.
But I understand why FSF can’t recommend viable devices running custom ROMs that do have VoLTE capability… i.e. blobs.
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There was a blog article published on November 22nd on the FSF website that provided supplemental information for the buying guide:
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My dream is that Librem 5 get FSF RYF Cert but this is far considering that Librem 5 socs it need even a HDMI-BLOB to boot. 
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