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?