Group talk:Hardware/Certifications/Respect Your Freedom/Criteria

Suggestion: Communicating with Customers

Suggested addition: "Manufacturers will be open for communication with and try to cooperate with internet product fora that are moderated by active users and/or software developers for a certain product."

Suggestion: Clarify documentation freeness scope

Let us say a large corporation releases an FSF-endorsed music player, the Foo Player, which comes with a complete manual, which is under a free license. Its book division also releases "Foo Player: The Idiot's Guide". Is that book required to be free in order to get the endorsement? The current guidelines suggest that it might have to be. However, other companies do not have such a restriction on the books they ship about the Foo Player. It would be overreaching, in my view, to disadvantage the company who makes a product in this way, in comparison to its competitors, in order to get the endorsement. And the disadvantage is greater for larger companies with more divisions, which is unfair. As long as sufficient free documentation is available to understand and use the product, that should be enough. Perhaps we could say that all documentation shipped with the product, or necessary to understand the product's features, should be free? -- Gerv 09:30, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion: Reconsider or restate basis for "Incompatible Endorsements"

This section says, in part:

"because these would give an appearance of legitimacy to those products, and may make users think the product requires them"

As far as I know, running Windows is not illegal in any jurisdiction. The FSF may consider software freedom to be a moral issue, but the act of running proprietary software is usually not a legal one. Also, I think it is unlikely that, if a box bears both "Works with Windows" and "Made for Mac", then a consumer will think that _both_ are necessary for the product to work. I am not sure the logic of this section withstands scrutiny. If you are worried about this problem, surely the right thing to do is require that a "Works with GNU/Linux" badge (or whatever) is given equal prominence to the Windows and/or Mac badges?

Pragmatically, making product creators choose between the FSF's badge and other badges means that a lot of products which do respect a user's freedom will end up not marked as such, because the company thinks that consumers need the reassurance of these badges to know that the hardware works with their OS. If the aim is to a) encourage products which respect freedom and b) let consumers know which products do and don't, then this outcome is bad for the campaign and bad for consumers. Yet, "Works with Windows" and "respects freedom" are not incompatible concepts, as the FSF acknowledges. -- Gerv 09:30, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion: The guidelines should require equal billing for "free software" over open source, not "more prominent" billing

The FSF wishes to promote "free software", understandably. But many more people understand "open source". Putting the two terms together is an aid to understanding for the reader. Explanatory text on a product box like: "All software used in this product is both free software and open source software" would be prohibited by this restriction. But I think this should be OK. Are we going to require product creators to bump the font size of the words "free software" by half a point in order to pass this criterion? That seems unnecessary.

It is completely right that the criteria should not permit "free software" to be given lesser billing than "open source". -- Gerv 09:30, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Use of GNU/Linux

What does it mean for an operating system to "include GNU"? If I ship something which has no GNU software except a copy of glibc, do I have to call it GNU/Whatever? -- Gerv 09:30, 14 October 2010 (UTC)