@mjg59 one of the things that really pisses me off about the movement in general- and i bet you share my pain on this- is that to create gnu it was necessary to temporarily enlist non-free components to bootstrap something more fundamentally free... and while of course this is not denied and even granted an explicit exception- when you do it, it becomes subjected to all sorts of double standards and bad takes from the orthodoxy.
for example: free hw deserves the same graces to become viable.