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. ]]]

When an ISP requires the customer to use the router it supplies,
does that router come with nonfree software also provided by the ISP?

I would expect so -- because that would give the ISP a motive for this
demand.  The ISP wants to impose more control over the customer by
making per run this software.

This would also be a reason why imposition of the ISP's choice of router
could do concrete wrong.

However, there is a crucial question here.  Does "router" mean an
ordinary internet router, such as you could buy from ThinkPenguin and
can run LibreCMC?

Or does it mean "cable modem"?  When I inquired about this two years
ago, there were cable modems you could buy, but there was no cable
modem that you could run with free software.  Furthermore, I was told that
they all had a back door for the ISP to change the software through.

I concluded there is no benefit to having any other cable modem except
the one that the ISP supplies.

Thus, the issue for simple ethernet/wifi routers is very different
from the issue for cable modems.  Which one is this issue about?

  > in Czechia and partially thanks to FSFE's campaign we have
  > > a lot of people doing self-ISP and providing internet to others, see
  > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_provider

That's a good thing in any case, but it would still be good to know
the answer to the question above.

  > Though all that is not related to free hardware design. Router Freedom
  > is not related to free hardware.

That is clearly true.

-- 
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)