An organization which exists exclusively to advocate for a type of program caring about programmability is not dumb. That seems… kinda obvious? They don’t exist to rate the technical superiority or inferiority of hardware devices, they exist to advocate for the simple position that: if a device can be programmed, the user of that device ought to control the program on the device, not some company which happens to hold the copyright over the on-device program.

And if you do have hardware version 2, the FSF says you should at least never update your firmware.

Um… absolutely not? They say that running proprietary firmware represents an injustice (perpetrated by the copyright holders of the firmware, btw, not the user). Updating the firmware to free software would obviously be great in the eyes of the FSF; upgrading to proprietary firmware would be simply continuing the existing, unjust status quo. You appear to have completely made up this particular position.

Obviously, version two is better than version one in the technical sense, because it has more capabilities. But it is also obvious that version one does not deny its users any abilities that it affords instead to the vendor- neither the user nor the vendor can modify the firmware inside the device, so the vendor doesn’t exercise more control over the sold device than the user does. Obviously, the vendor designed the device, but that’s as far as their influence over it extends.

Version two, on the other hand, it programmable. This make it technically superior, but since the firmware is proprietary, the user is denied the right to view source code and modify the firmware, a right which the vendor continues to hold after the device is sold to the customer. In other words, the vendor has a right over the device under copyright law that the customer does not.

That’s not an ideal situation, and it’s the one the FSF is trying to prevent. You have every right to buy hardware with firmware encumbered by such restrictions, I have myself. But it’s not dumb to care about one day freeing yourself of such restrictions, and that won’t happen if no one is pushing back on the practice.

Surely you don’t think all free software was technically superior to all proprietary software at the start of the movement, and surely you don’t think it even is now. But if you still think it’s a good thing that we have the free software ecosystem, then perhaps you sometimes care about things other than pure technical superiority. If so, you ought to be able to understand the FSF’s position here.

From the article:

Freedom to copy and change software is an ethical imperative because those activities are feasible for those who use software: the equipment that enables you to use the software (a computer) is also sufficient to copy and change it. Today’s mobile computers are too weak to be good for this, but anyone can find a computer that’s powerful enough.

You can’t build and run a circuit design or a chip design in your computer. Constructing a big circuit is a lot of painstaking work, and that’s once you have the circuit board. Fabricating a chip is not feasible for individuals today; only mass production can make them cheap enough.

Basically, you’re legally prohibited from copying software, but you’re technically prohibited from copying ICs. Hardware isn’t “out of scope”, it’s just not the same kind of thing as software- information can be copied for basically zero marginal cost, but hardware can’t.

The FSF exists to fight legal encumbrances on the copying and modification of software because the technical details of hardware and software are totally different. Although, even in that same article, the FSF advocates for and recommends free hardware designs, which are more analogous to software. You can care about more than one thing. The FSF just particularly cares about software, including firmware, being free of unnecessary legal encumbrances related to copyright.

They’re not saying devices shouldn’t be programmable- they’re saying if they are, users need to have the right to control the software that runs on said device.

For the FSF it’s not about what’s more “secure” or less complex, but rather whether there’s freedom to be had. In the one case, having rights to view and modify the source gives the user additional freedoms they otherwise don’t have, e.g. to apply security patches as you point out. In the other case, it doesn’t, because even if they could view and modify the source, they can’t make changes to their device with that ability even in principle. Note that, in general, the law does not prohibit users from modifying hardware that they own, so that’s not an issue of freedom. But software is.

Having a circuit diagram for a chip you own is cool, but it doesn’t allow you to change an IC- you don’t have the practical ability to do that. Likewise if the “firmware” is permanent- viewing the “source” is maybe technically interesting but grants you zero additional abilities. If it’s defective, it’s the same as buying a defective IC. Tough luck.

You can choose not to care about the additional freedom you get if you’re allowed to view and modify firmware for programmable devices you own, and that’s fine. It’s typically not meaningfully important for me either. But it’s absolutely not an arbitrary line.

Why do you say it matters where the firmware is being executed? Is it less important to control less powerful computers you own? Why should the code suddenly be unimportant if it’s not executing on your main processor?

The line is basically programmability. If a device runs “firmware” that can’t be changed, that’s really just a part of the design of the hardware you bought, so the fact that you can’t see or modify the source code is irrelevant- even if you could, it wouldn’t give you any more control over the hardware. If it runs firmware that can be changed, it’s a programmable computer, and by running proprietary firmware, you’re giving up control you would otherwise have over your computer.

The FSF’s position is roughly that software (instructions that run on programmable computers) ought to be free as a matter of ethics, but that hardware is different, basically because of the difficulty and resources necessary to “copy” hardware. See Free Hardware and Free Hardware Designs for Stallman’s thoughts. Basically, he (and the FSF) don’t consider “free hardware” to be a coherent concept- just “free hardware designs”. So using FSF terminology, it doesn’t make sense to speak of free or open-source hardware.

The FSF basically draws the line at easy programmability. If a device was designed to be reprogrammed, what it’s running is software, which should be free, otherwise you’re ceding control over that computer to the copyright holders of the software it runs- and that doesn’t just include your host CPU, it includes every computer you own, including other ones on your motherboard. If a device was not meant to be easily reprogrammed, then the “software” it runs is really just a permanent part of the design, and the FSF doesn’t really care about this type of firmware being “free”. Devices with firmware in Linux are clearly able to be easily reprogrammed- you just change the firmware code- so firmware that runs on these devices meets the FSF’s definition of software.