[freem-dev] FreeM Project Statement on macOS "Big Sur" and M1 Apple Silicon

[John P. Willis]

Hello, Freemsters!

Today, it's time to share a bit of news.

As many of you are no doubt aware, Apple has released its 
first round of hardware powered by Apple ARM silicon, along
with macOS "Big Sur".

The FreeM project is deeply concerned about Apple's attempts
to strong-arm (no pun intended) developers into submitting
their software for official Apple review, which costs money
and leaves little room for POSIX-compliant applications not
fitting into the App Store ecosystem. It appears that without
Apple's official seal of approval on any given application,
users may be forced to bypass macOS security measures globally,
potentially opening themselves up to breaches and attacks,
just to run one non-Apple-approved application. Also, Big Sur
further expands on the "phone home" malware to give Apple a
wide surface for customer surveillance and a remote killswitch
for applications that it--or the governments of its users--wish
to restrict.

More than this, we are also deeply concerned over allegations 
of Apple's complicity in using child labor in Congolese cobalt 
mines, often resulting in death or disfiguration, as well as 
Apple's lobbying attempts to derail "right to repair" legislation
that would break its hegemony over its ecosystem, and the environmental
destruction of its hardware security designed to make secondhand
hardware into landfill fodder.

As a result of these catastrophic policies by Apple, the FreeM
project is introducing a tiered ports schema. Essentially,
a particular target platform will be assigned one of three tiers:

* Tier 1 ports are guaranteed to support all new FreeM features,
  and once version 1.0.0 releases, will be considered production-
  ready. Changes to the underlying platform that break building,
  installing, or usage of FreeM will be given top priority.

* Tier 2 ports are "best effort", in that new and advanced FreeM
  features will only be available if the underlying platform can 
  reasonably support them. Once version 1.0.0 is reached, these
  will also be considered production-ready, albeit with a potential
  reduction in feature set and/or performance. Like Tier 1,
  FreeM should build, install, and be usable on Tier 2 platforms.

* Tier 3 ports are also "best effort" in regard to new and advanced
  features, with the added caveat that no efforts will be made to
  break broken builds resulting in a major deviation by the platform
  vendor from POSIX and other relevant UNIX standards. They will
  *not* be considered suitable for production work, as using them may
  require bypassing significant security "features" of the underlying
  platform, and building, installing, or running FreeM may require
  significant modifications to the underlying platform and its
  configuration.

Tier 1 ports are GNU/Linux (all platforms), NetBSD (all platforms),
FreeBSD (all platforms), and Solaris (sparc64 and i386pc).

Tier 2 ports are SCO OpenServer, IBM AIX, and Tru64 UNIX.

Tier 3 ports are GNU/Hurd, Cygwin, WSL, Mac OS X, and macOS.

The FreeM Project strongly encourages its users and developers to
abandon the Apple and Microsoft ecosystems and consider free-software 
alternatives, as both a statement of protest and an ethical decision.

Thank you,

John Willis
FreeM Project Lead.