Re: FSF continuously harms Free Hardware

[Richard Stallman]

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  > I think that none in Free Software would support being forced to use 
  > proprietary software filled with malware that injects malware in their 
  > free software with hardware designs it is the exact same situation just 
  > instead instead of "compiler" you have "fabricators".

You're right that the two are similar.  But there is a crucial
difference.  We can get around the problems at the level above the
processor level by writing software.  We can't deal with the problems
inside the processor that way.

Suppose a processor has malicious functionalities.  There are three
ways it is likely to be implementd:

1. By unchangeable circuits.

2. By firmware in ROM.

3. By secret firmware in RAM.

These three are equivalent because, in all three, we are equally
helplsss.  In theory, in case 3 reverse engineering would be able to
fix it.  But we can't do any reverse engineering -- we can encourage
people to do such it.

Thus, we treat all three cases the same.





-- 
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)