"Beside of this, the whole discussion reminds me of one thing:
I still don't understand why "baked-in proprietary code" is considered as
fine by rms"
Actually that's not true. rms does ackgowledge the issue with malicious
circuitry:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.html
"The phone network firmware comes preinstalled. If all it did was sit there
and talk to the phone network when you wish, we could regard it as equivalent
to a circuit. When we insist that the software in a computing device must be
free, we can overlook preinstalled firmware that will never be upgraded,
because it makes no difference to the user that it's a program rather than a
circuit.
Unfortunately, in this case it would be a malicious circuit. Malicious
features are unacceptable no matter how they are implemented."
and
"Putting these points together, we can tolerate nonfree phone network
firmware provided new versions of it won't be loaded, it can't take control
of the main computer, and it can only communicate when and as the free
operating system chooses to let it communicate. In other words, it has to be
equivalent to circuitry, and that circuitry must not be malicious."
