The Free Software Foundation is looking for a candidate to fill the position of the Engineering and Certification Manager to take care of the FSF’s Respects Your Freedom (RYF) program.
Considering that the RYF is relevant to many participants of the Pusim community in one way or another, I share this job posting in the hope that it will reach a larger number of motivated potential candidates.
To put this posting in the context of past discussions in this forum, the manager will likely facilitate certification review of Librem Key and Librem 5 and possibly other Purism devices. A large stalled backlog of other certification applications is also rumored.
Also, the manager may find it necessary to address together with the FSF licensing team the questions sent to the RYF by the community.
No No propietary firmware can NOT be permited either updates, if so Gnu will autokilled.
I hope FSF found a fancy pure Gnu Programmer for, someone with strong ethics, values, pirate and supersupa strong sense of mission, NOT SOMEONE CHEAPER AND GENERIC To Think That Firmware-Blob Is OK, in fact driver is useless on firmware-blob-linux-floss-foss-oss
Saw this and read it a bit. It’s interesting to imagine for a moment “what if I did that instead of my current job.”
My current job is going in fascinating new directions. There’s always a lot to do, and they like me. Somehow hiring someone to learn from me and make similar software, but with AI, hasn’t fully replaced me yet.
But sometimes I receive calls at night that prevent me from sleeping, as part of keeping the software running globally.
What’s to prevent a bad faith actor like my worse self if I was VERY sleep deprived, from getting their way into this job position and then just rejecting all applicants for RYF slowly and unilaterally while eating money from the FSF? When I think of the FSF generally I think of absolute extremism about the one specific topic that all software should be free software. And as a person using Librem 5 as my phone for 3 years, I could easily see how a product like a Librem 5 that I feel was technologically made from a good faith effort might nevertheless be flagged as nonfree if the BM818 app gains an Update button (NOTE: I never asked for a refund and have no comment on forum gripes on the refund topic, as that is not a technology topic, and say “in good faith” here referring only to the fact that my Librem 5 exists as a technology and runs many GNU tools natively). Meanwhile some phone hardware from 2001 that runs Replicant with 256MB of RAM could potentially get certified even if nobody can stand to use it.
I do not mean to be cynical, and my experience reverse engineering has mostly been on software not hardware so these folks might not consider me at all for this position were I to apply…
But it’s weird for me to think how much this job might have social implications for anyone looking to FSF for guidance, and how easily those implications could be manipulated by bias. Seems practically all technology does anymore is send everyone’s data into big server farms to extract out how to extenuate their biases to achieve goals. How can someone take this job and not bend the FSF influence on the world with their bias?
Will having a “smart phone” detract from someone’s eligibility for this position? Or have I simply begun the process of losing my mind while citing the FSF as a scapegoat for how I wish my life had been instead?
I suspect that people with good knowledge of the subject are avoiding the job, because they realize all the problems with how the RYF program was designed. If they hire someone competent, that person within a week is going to start redesigning the RYF certification to make rational sense and is going to get into hot water.
If they want to maintain Stallman’s distinction between hardware as something that doesn’t get updated and software which can be updated, then they should move from a binary Yes/No certification to a point system, because otherwise there will be no modern computing device that can comply with their standard.
I wouldn’t be annoyed by this situation if the RYF certification was actually helping to get freer hardware on the market, but it isn’t. Basically, it is alienating the companies that should be its allies and setting standards which aren’t helping to improve the situation at all. If the FSF were putting money in the right places to help liberate more hardware (like funding Biktorgj’s firmware work on the EG25-G modem or working on Synopsys DDR timing trainer blob), I wouldn’t criticize the RYF certification, but the FSF isn’t funding the critical dev work, and the RYF certification is making it harder for companies to get the funding that they need to create freer devices.
If anyone on this forum has any influence inside the FSF, please speak up inside the organization about this issue.
If that is the case, then it is rather unfortunate. I imagine that the FSF are specifically looking for a managing role, rather than a purely technical one, in order to move the program forward. Someone has to come with a plan. I expect it as a necessary part of the responsibility which is listed first.
Developing technical and strategic direction for the RYF program and related initiatives;
I do not believe that the notion of a multi-tier or graded RYF certification is hard to sell to the FSF. It is not unusual to hear in the community that the idea of “freedom ladder”, which the FSF applies extensively to help individuals to gain computing freedoms gradually instead of attempting maximum freedom in a potentially insurmountable single leap, could or should be applied to hardware rating as well.
Could you elaborate on how a point system would solve this? I imagine that the certification could have a certain amount of points per … something. Then, the products could range in their rating by a total sum of points. But how does one award the points? What would the points mean?
I imagine that, if the community could come up with a working solution, it could potentially help any hesitating applicants for that job and allow the RYF program to move forward.
