[Arm-netbook] OT: Librem 5?

[Bill Kontos]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 3:05 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
<lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:

>
>  but seriously: ethical decision-making is an on-off thing.  it's
> either black - you made an ethical decision - or it's white - you made
> an UNethical decision.  you chose CONVENIENCE over making a stand, and
> saying "no further.  the line is HERE".

No it's not. People need upgraded computers and the x200 libreboot
supply will eventually run out. This is not convenience, at some point
something becomes slow enough that you can't effectively get your job
done. Purism laptops represent a decent offering for security etc and
afaik there is no other laptop that cuts power to the camera like they
do. For 99% of the users the only argument for libreboot and free
firmware is security. Purism is trying to tacle that requirement and
has been fairly sucessful so far. I would expect the same to happen
with the phones. Afaik the only blob existing there will be for the
baseband which will be burned into rom on a separate chip with no
access to main memory and a killswitch. So it's pretty much as good as
it gets given existing regulations and I don't see why having a phone
that can do all this stuff is a bad idea. Heck having a phone with
backdoors that can run a regular gnu stack is better than what we have
right now. Purists that will tell you to just not use a phone because
we are required by regulations to run those few kb of closed rom code
have no place in this discussion honestly because they offer nothing
to the table for a solution. People need phones and having a phone
with some blobs allows for much more practical freedoms than having no
phone at all.
>
>  the problem is... people *really* don't like it when you point that
> out... because people don't normally think in hard black-and-white.

And they shouldn't. Thinking in black and white has been the sole
reason for many many attrocities and racism in human history. I am
really dissapointed to read this coming from you.


> which is why you get people going completely off-the-fucking-wall NUTS
> during question-time at dr stallman's talks.  they accuse him of
> hypocrisy, shout and almost scream at him... just so that they can
> mentally dismiss everything he said for the past 105 minutes and be
> able to walk out in a huff.
>

rms should seriously work on his presentation. You don't change
someone's world view in one fell swoop, you do it 1% at a time. I felt
exactly the same when I first read about rms and I was so repelled by
him that I almost just wipped my fresh first time ubuntu installation.
The only reason I persisted was for reasons of my own character.
Unfortunately we don't have the technical means he has with an entire
organisation supporting him technically and a lot of us have hardware
requirements that mandate blobs. This is why projects like this, riscv
and the talos project are so important. The free culture is still too
left on the overton window for the average joe. So it is my personal
opinion that the FSF should find a different speaker that can
understand his/her audience better than rms does. Let alone the fact
that pretty much all his talks are to the wrong audience. Think about
it, you have to already be into FOSS to learn of rms, those that need
to learn about it are the ones that are not into it. In adition to
this I don't have time to figure out every stupid way microsoft breaks
compatibility with .docx and .odt, if it doesn't work on libreoffice I
upload it on google docs and download the converted form. I just don't
have time for this and the end result is all that matters.

> in a way, software libre - the whole FSF thing - is basically the
> modern-day equivalent of the black rights, slavery freedom / rights,
> women's rights, and any civil liberties movement you care to name.
> it's just completely unappreciated as such.

As I said, the free culture movement is still too left on the overton
window, but people are getting more and more fed up with the current
situation( i.e. drm, copyright on various fan-made content from series
etc), so it might improve in the near future. We just got our first
FOSS game engine with enough patreon money for a developer to work
full time on it. CC is a also a big deal with good high quality
content published with it. Countries are willing to host websites that
directly violate copyright laws because there is practical demand for
it. The EU can try as hard as they want to hide the fact that piracy
does not affect revenue streams but the reality is the only reasons
publishers push against piracy with the petty argument of "paying the
creator" is so free culture does not get the chance to become a more
mainstream acceptable idea. So things are changing and the change is
accelerating. People want better treatment on their software and you
can see it by the marketshare changes, and with time it will improve.
But it is BY NO MEANS a black or white scenario.

It would also help if rms would realise his position at the fsf as a
public entity and did not advocate pedophilia without any compelling
scientific arguments on his personal website.