[Arm-netbook] System 76 - Entering Phase 3

[Lyberta]

Bill Kontos:
> No, don't worry. I don't call names on anyone. As RMS said, I'm not glad
> that he died, but I'm glad that he's gone. I believe in the value of human
> life above all else. It would be immoral( imo) to apply crude logic to
> this. I do not celebrate the death of any human being no matter how savage
> or harmful that person might have been to humanity. And I sure won't
> celebrate Linus' death because you might hate him but it won't change the
> fact that we 100% rely on his work and we don't know how his death could
> affect future development of linux and free drivers in general.

There is a line that you may cross after which there is almost no
return. If the whole world is extremist and fascist, then you fix it
with extremism and terrorism. An eye for an eye makes the whole world
blind but by that point you don't care. You've given up on life. You
want blood. You keep the last bullet for yourself. You choose free
software so that intelligence agencies can't spy on your activity. So
that they are unaware of your plan that you've been plotting for the
most of your life. So that you are free from belief, trust and law. You
never forget and you never forgive. You are anonymous. You are the
judge, jury and executioner.

...

Fuck. I hate this world, I hate myself. There go 2 hours without suicide
thoughts.

> And anyway something that is not widely known: when arm netbooks started
> becoming a thing OEMs were putting linux on them( of course). Microsoft saw
> a very threatening market emerging and raged hell upon them that if they
> kept doing this the sales of their other models would suffer due to them
> removing the OEM discount on the windows license. After that they proceeded
> to change the model so instead of charging per machine they charge per
> model. So basically even if you buy e.g. a Dell Lattitude with Ubuntu
> preinstalled and then wipe it and replace it with an FSF approved distro
> YOU ARE STILL PAYING THE WINDOWS LICENSE. Now some people might disagree
> with me, but for me libre software is a war against oppression and is
> directly competing with microsoft etc( disagree as in that we do not
> compete but exist to fulfeel our own needs). So just for this reason, if
> you need to buy an x86 computer and a libreboot model is not an option it
> is better to buy a system76 instead of e.g. a dell or a thinkpad and then
> install gnu/linux on it.

Interesting observation. I have bought Dell laptop with Ubuntu
preinstalled as it was the only model with GNU/Linux distro I could find
quickly.

> Anyway I guess there is also another big difference for me: Some people
> might think it is ok to have a binary blob e.g. on the firmware for their
> wifi card as long as you don't interact with it via userland and the OS and
> the applications are libre. I'm on the exact opposite position: I consider
> blobs and an operating system that limit or obscure my access to hardware
> to be of the most unethical nature and less so the programs themselves.

Yes, the closer the program to the hardware, the worse it is if it's
non-free. Therefore, proprietary BIOS/UEFI and kernel blobs are the worst.

> I am not e.g.
> buying nvidia hardware, even though it's the only 100% libre gpu with 3d
> accel. I don't care. I'd much rather support amd in their free driver
> efforts and instead hope that someone will pick the fact that they do not
> need to write any gallium3D stuff but just reverse engineer the (small)
> blobs that still exist, resulting in a much easier way to write a 100%
> libre driver compared to nuveau.

I have AMD CPU+GPU or APU on most of my PCs. I've heard a lot of bad
stuff about Nvidia. But now AMD Ryzen CPUs contain PSP backdoor. And my
suspicion is that they've intentionally shipped faulty CPUs which lock
up during FMA instruction so that they can plant another NSA backdoor
into the microcode update.

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