Pine64 Hardware and FSF RYF Certification

[z4v4l]

you missed the point, that it's irreplaceable, - you need your own SoC design/manufacturing facility to "monkey" with this kind of stuff, you need to become Rockchip, TSMC etc. and when you become Rockchip. TSMC etc, you find that having all things open to anybody is not such a cool idea - unless you are going to be a charity organization. but eh, as with all irrational things, it's impossible to argue a productive way.

In the case of Rockchip, it's a design mistake to provide boot-rom and not boot-spi flash.

It's not any special to Rockchip, every ARM vendor does so. and I don't see it a "mistake". The purpose of ROM code is to reliably start out of reset and to load the platform firmware, for which there is storage provision in form of SPI flash as well (and eMMC, SD too). This way, the possibility of entirely bricking the chip is lesser. additionally to being a more reliable way, it is much more flexible. You want to "monkey" with the board, and they (Rockchip, Allwinner) need their SoCs to be selling. they earn money for living, not making SoCs for fun and "monkeying". and angried users that bricked their devices irreversibly after trying "better things" from some c00lh4ck3r freedom lover will be a serious obstacle in achieving that.