[Arm-netbook] Conflict-free minerals

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 1:08 AM, Jean Flamelle <eaterjolly at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just thought I'd make a poke about this.

 good idea.

> Been a bit busy lately to contribute to the liberating chip or the
> standards thread, but will be getting back on those soon.

 great.  knock yourself out :)

> No one has really mentioned conflict-free minerals, or does so often
> in the libre community.
> It's kinda like adding just one other complication to an already
> mess-y problem, but I'm interested to know more about the details and
> problems involved with paying attention to the actual mineral
> sourcing.

 correct.  libre means software... which is another area of highly
specialist ethical expertise (the application of ethics to software).

 conflict minerals is the application of specialist ethical expertise
to the sourcing of materials.


> I can imagine many OEM's don't publish or even pay attention to where
> they get minerals from, so I imagine the potential parts list dwindles
> beyond reason at simply limiting one's self to OEM's that at least
> list their mineral sources, much less then actually trying to them
> limit it based on the fairly subjective "conflict-free" qualification.

 fairphones does.... but they then screwed up by not bothering with
the ethical issues of ensuring that the operating system was
actually... legal to distribute.   so all the Fairphone 1 products
they designed are basically a ticking landfill timebomb.... ENTIRELY
DEFEATING the whole fucking point of the exercise.

 they still have not resolved the use of the GPL-violating Mediatek OS
distributed with that phone, meaning that they have LOST ALL RIGHTS TO
DISTRIBUTE PRODUCT - including the Fairphone 2 and all future
products.

 the way that they can fix that is to ask every single contributor to
u-boot and the linux kernel for their distribution rights back, but
first obtain the full GPLv2 source to that Mediatek OS.

 alcatel did this (alcatel is one of the main sources of mediatek
GPLv2 compliant source code).

 Fairphones did not.


 so.

 what do you think of that, jean? should we go out and buy Fairphone products?

l.