Re: FSF continuously harms Free Hardware

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  >  >  and it would make the certification program almost a no-op. -- RMS

  > I disagree that it would make it a almost no-op as there is a lot of FHD 
  > developers that would probably be more then happy to get their designs 
  > certified,

I think I see another misunderstanding here, which has become visible
because you've adopted my suggestion to talk about "free hardware designs"
rather than "free hardware".

RYF certifies hardware products for sale.

The aim of RYF certification is to guide people in buying hardware
products that won't require nonfree software included in their system
loads.  This is helpful in practice because it is hard to tell whether
a product fits that criterion.  People who are not hardware wizards
(and that includes me) would find this very difficult to check.  We
would need to study a lot, to even be able to try to check.  Thus, RYF
helps us in a very practical way.

I don't see that you have come across any flaw in the RYF program,
Rather, I think you are trying to achieve another goal: to promote
(perhaps by certifying) free hardware designs.

That goal is good, but has nothing to do with RYF.  That goal might be
a reason to do some additional thing, but that additional thing would
not be anything like RYF.

What should that additional thing be?  Not certification, I think.  I
don't think it would particularly help matters for some organization
to "certify" free hardware designs.  The reason is that you can easily
tell for yourself whether a hardware design is free.  Just look at
whether it carries a free license.

The hard thing to check would be whether the design is a good one.
Checking that takes hardware design expertise ;-{.  We don't have any.

What could someone do, that would go beyond publishing
https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-hardware-designs.html, that would help
promote making and using free hardware designs?  I don't know.  Do you
have any ideas?

If you find a good idea, maybe the FSF could do it.  Or maybe you
could do it.  Maybe you could do it, and the FSF could host the info
to call attention to it.

The first step is, what would be helpful to do?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)