[Arm-netbook] Conflict-free minerals

[mike.valk at gmail.com]

2017-08-11 8:03 GMT+02:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>:
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 1:08 AM, Jean Flamelle <eaterjolly at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.

True and the FP1 has been officially been discontinued from support.
FP2 is a Qualcomm device.

>
>  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.

They've tried to do better with FP2. But still they did not fully
grasp the implications.

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

Well, They've focused on one side of the equation, upstream. We've
focused on the to other, downstream.

So in the end we need both approaches.

At least they've raised some awareness and show the world that a
viable business can be founded with focus on ethical hardware
resources.

The software part remained as shitty as the rest. Let us show the
world that can be done as well!