Your hardware is 100% “not free”. It has proprietary firmware. Lots of it. Most of it is for internal chips that you are not even aware of. The hardware you are running is not free. And it has firmware. Clear?

So, your position is that hardware that let’s you upgrade some of this firmware, hardware that let’s you control what bits get put on it, is LESS free than hardware that does not let you see or control that. How greater control is less free is totally beyond me.

And the reason you think this is because you actually have the non-free bits that make up a firmware upgrade. So you tell yourself that not touching this upgrade is a good thing because that upgrade is “proprietary”. Except that you are still running proprietary firmware for the exact same hardware. It needs firmware to work. The firmware you are downloading is just an upgrade.

Either you are running hardware that does not let you upgrade its firmware but that still has firmware nonetheless or you are running hardware with firmware that could be upgraded but you are refusing to upgrade it.

Either way, you have done absolutely nothing to advance your “freedom”. Honestly, it just boggles my mind.

Now, if there really was hardware out there that could be run without using any proprietary bits, that would be a different story. If you were willing to run such hardware, I would buy your ideological purity story. But we all know that this is not the hardware you are running. If you are not typing these comments on x86-64 than it is on ARM. Either way, your words are going through proprietary firmware before they get to me (even if you run these FSF approved distros).

I look forward to the day when truly free hardware exists and I can lose this argument to you. I truly do.