So, first, I can attest to the fact a whole computer will definitely require
multiple companies and people to participate.
1. You need somebody working on a distribution, like Rubén
2. You'll probably need somebody to reverse engineer something (like video
drivers)
3. You'll need somebody to design something (be it at the board level and/or
a complete system level)
4. You'll need to get the cooperation of people within companies
5. You'll need to get a factory somewhere to produce it
6. You'll need companies to distribute it
7. You'll need companies to support it
8. etc
Just to get the ath9k firmware free'd and supported it took at least a dozen
people. Many of them played a major part. The point was only that there are
many people which need to participate in the proccess before any kind of
product will get into your hands.
A computer contains many parts/chipsets and getting them all free'd is going
to be a lot of work.
The privacy issue is separate from the free software issue. While you can
hide stuff in non-free firmware more easily there is also the possibility of
hiding it in hardware. It's better for the firmware to be free though as it
does make it a bit more difficult to hide something malicious though.
Nobody who understands whats happening with hardware is going to argue
traditional functions aren't being moved to firmware. It's been happening
near 20 years now (1990s). In the early days these devices would eat up to
1/3 of a users system resources. The goal was definitely to cut costs and not
to add DRM or other privacy invasive features. There was a significant
savings back then to move to firmware based designs. Now they are doing it to
reduce time to release (results in shipping buggy and incomplete products),
cut costs (you can see its even further as the flash is no longer included on
the boards even in many cases, it's just uploaded to the memory on insertion
or system boot), etc.
I didn't say that the inerts of todays PCs aren't providing additional
functionality either. Only that traditional functions done in hardware are
being moved to firmware.
