[Arm-netbook] OT: Librem 5?

[Jonathan Frederickson]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 8:05 AM, 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".

Let's assume that everyone agrees on what makes a decision ethical or
unethical for a moment - this is not the case, but it's a huge topic
on its own, so let's sidestep that.

I disagree. For any single decision regarding which component to pick,
this may be true. But as a whole, it's more grey than that.

As a hypothetical, let's say you're trying to make a phone that's as
free as possible. You're able to include components with free firmware
and free drivers right up until you hit the GPU, at which point the
only available chip that fits within your budget has proprietary
firmware. Every other phone on the market also has proprietary
firmware for their GPUs, and the rest of it is more proprietary than
your new device. Does the fact that your device also requires nonfree
firmware for that component make it unethical to produce this device
as a whole?

I would argue that it does not. Producing this device, while it
doesn't take you the whole way there, still gives users the ability to
choose a device that's more free than what they're currently able to
choose. If the creators of this device took the hard-line stance that
every component must be free despite not being able to procure free
versions of the components they require, the phone simply wouldn't be
made, and users would be worse off for it.

> 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.

To run with your analogy here: the Emancipation Proclamation took
effect in 1863, the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865, but racial
discrimination was legally permitted in the US until the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. Had the country taken a hard-line stance that all slaves
must be freed *and* treated equally at the same time, there likely
would have been more opposition to the idea than there was to the
single step of freeing the slaves.

Both are important, but it's easier to convince people to change one
step at a time, and the world is still made a better place each time.
Not perfect, no, but better.