Respects Your Freedom is a hardware certification program that encourages the creation and sale of hardware that will do everything possible to respect freedom, privacy and that will ensure that users have control over their device.
Basic it's about having a computer or hardware device and having full control over it, know that you are not being spied on or tracked.
As well as being able to run any software you want without asking for permission and share with friends without worrying about managing digital restrictions (DRM).
What is the Respects Your Freedom certification?
For a manufacturer to acquire this certification by the Free Software Foundation, must comply with a series of guidelines set by the FSF, among which basically all the software related to the product must be totally free and the source code of this must be provided to the users among other things.
To receive a certificate from the Fund, the ACT must meet the following requirements:
- delivery of free drivers and firmware
- all software supplied with the device must be free
- no DRM restrictions
- possibility of complete control over the operation of the device
- support for firmware replacement
- working support of GNU / Linux distributions completely free
- the use of non-proprietary formats and software components
- Availability of free documentation.
Any generally useful technical documentation about the product, such as user or developer manuals, should be released under a free license.
If you want to know a little more about these guidelines that must be met, you can learn about them by going to the following link.
About the new ASUS KCMA-D8 certified motherboard
Recently the Free Software Foundation introduced a third motherboard, which received the certificate "Respects Your Freedom" confirming that the device meets the user's privacy and freedom requirements.
Whereby you are granted the right to use a special logo on materials related to the product, emphasizing that the user has complete control over the device.
This certification was received by the Vikings D8 motherboard ( ASUS KCMA-D8) and workstation Vikings D8 Workstation based on this.
The motherboard is designed for use with AMD Opteron 42xx processors based on the Bulldozer microarchitecture manufactured since 2011.
All source codes for firmware, bootloader, and operating system components are available in source code under a free license.
Instead of a proprietary BIOS from the manufacturer, the blob-erased Coreboot version is used as firmware.
The board is fully compatible with the Trisquel distribution, which is recommended for the default installation.
The characteristics of this motherboard are:
- Supported CPU: CPU Socket Type Dual Socket C32
- Type Dual CPU AMD Opteron 4200/4100 Series System Bus HyperTransport 3.0 Technology
- Number of DDR3 Slots 8 x 240pin Standard DDR3 DDR3 1333/1066/800
- Maximum memory supported 128GB (RDIMM) / 32GB (UDIMM)
- Expansion slots:
- PCI Express 2.0 x16
- PCI-E x16 (Gen2 X8 Link)
- PCI-E x16 (Gen2 X16 Link)
- PCI Express x8
- PCI-E x8 (Gen2 X4 Link)
- Intel 82574L LAN Chipset Speed 10/100 / 1000Mbps
- 82574nd Intel XNUMXL LAN Chipset
- Second speed LAN10 / 100 / 1000Mbps Max
- LANDual speed 10/100 / 1000Mbps
- Storage devices
- SATA6 x SATA 3.0Gb / sSATA RAID0 / 1/5/10
- Rear ports:
- PS / 22COM1 Video
- Ports D-Sub
- USB 1.1 / 2.02 2.0 x USB XNUMX
Of the previously certified devices, the following can be highlighted:
- Laptops TET-X200, TET-X200T, TET-X200s, TET-T400, TET-T400s and TET-T500 (Lenovo ThinkPad X200, T400 and T500), Vikings X200, Gluglug X60 (Lenovo ThinkPad X60), Libreboot X200 (Lenovo ThinkPad X200), Taurinus X200 (Lenovo ThinkPad X200), Libreboot T400 (Lenovo ThinkPad T400).
- ThinkPenguin, ThinkPenguin TPE-NWIFIROUTER, and TPE-R1100 wireless routers.
- LulzBot AO-3 and LulzBot TAZ 101 6D printers.
- Tehnoetic Wireless USB Adapters TET-N150, TET-N150HGA, TET-N300, TET-N300HGA, TET-N300DB, TET-N450DB.
- TET-D16 motherboards (ASUS KGPE-D16 with Coreboot firmware), Vikings D16.
- Vikings external sound card.
- The TET-X200DOCK and TET-T400DOCK docking stations for the X200, T400 and T500 series.
- TET-BT4 USB Bluetooth adapter.
- Zerocat Chipflasher programmer.
- Minifree Libreboot X200 Tablet.
It gives me that where you put free meant free. Free as in freedom.
I think you have a translation error in the article. You refer to the requirements to grant certification using the word 'free' and I think it would be 'free', it is true that in English 'free' is used for both meanings, but coming from the FSF I would rather point to the term ' free'.