100%.

There is a reason even the purists fall back on “hardware is out of scope”.

But calling firmware software drives worse outcomes. Will they do the same thing with RISC-V?

Is a RISC-V board better than an ARM board even if both have proprietary schematics and/or divers. In my view, clearly yes.

Every step towards open is positive.

The hypocrisy irks me somewhat as well. The FSF rather famously did not start by writing a kernel. It is why we have the GNU/Linux nonsense. The GNU utilities were first written to run on proprietary UNIX. And this made sense pragmatically as you have to start somewhere. But that was actually real “software” and yet RMS was ok with that. And today he tells people they cannot update the microcode in their Intel CPU.

According to his own definitions, the FSF should not have run a line of code on proprietary operating systems until the FSF had written its own kernel and drivers. But they enthusiastically did. Ok, so they did not write a kernel. How about the C library? Surely, they did not link to propriety C libraries. Or how about the compiler? Did they start with that? No, the first thing they wrote was a text editor (Emacs) and it was built with proprietary compilers, using proprietary C libraries, on proprietary operating systems. The C library came years later. Before that, all GNU software was linked with binary blobs (C library).

Fast-forward to today and you are supposed to condemn Debian for allowing binary blobs.

Not only dumb but massive hypocrisy.