On Monday 25. April 2016 13.24.46 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
now, as far as picking OSes is concerned that are FSF-Endorseable, we've got an interesting situation where we'll need some porting and packaging help. there basically aren't any good libre OSes for ARM (due to canonical's recent blatant GPL violations and record on privacy, those based on ubuntu *not* being "good", plus trisquel is currently based on ubuntu 8.04 which doesn't have an ARM port), and the only one for MIPS is gnewsense and that's been custom-targetted at the leemote laptop.
Debian is available for mipsel. If it weren't, I wouldn't be able to put it on the Ben NanoNote (jz4725) and there probably wouldn't be any cross-compilers in Debian for mipsel, either. I can't say much about the desktop stack here because the Ben doesn't have enough memory to run something like KDE. ;-)
the thing is though, that the current situation for FSF-Endorseability of hardware is even worse than it appears, due to the simple fact that there *aren't* any modern FSF-Endorseable x86 processors.... period. *all* intel processors of the past 15 years require a proprietary RSA-signed piece of firmware in order to boot, and all AMD processors require a licensed proprietary piece of firmware from Intel because AMD licensed intel's HDMI interface.
so... err.... basically, the approach that i'm taking, slow as it's progressing, actually stands to be the first modern "Good Enough Computing" [1] hardware that *can* actually be FSF-Endorsed.
There's been a discussion on the FSFE discussion list about this, with someone advocating the POWER architecture for high-end products as an alternative to x86(-64). I think people are realising that they might need some other irons in the fire.
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/discussion/2016-April/010912.html
Paul