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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.