[Arm-netbook] OT: Librem 5?

[Bill Kontos]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 9:49 PM, Isaac David <isacdaavid at isacdaavid.info> wrote:

> as a cellphone non-user and die-hard libre software acolyte, i don't
> see the Purism people as enemies. they only need to reword their
> marketing to be a bit less disingenuous. they speak the language of
> the purists; this is how we know they _are_ aware that their products
> will fall short of something like a RYF cert.
>

First of all congratulations for not using a cellphone. I literally
can't do that. People expect to find me on the phone. I have to follow
facebook teams for announcements and stuff. And yes their marketing
pisses me off a lot. I wish it was more honest but at the same time
they are not spewing lies right and left. They do have a timeline on
what they want to do, they just don't know how fast they will get
there. As it stands right now, purism laptops are the only laptops
that now come with coreboot preinstalled, automatically making them
the second most free platform after the libreboot x200s. Think about
that.

>> And they shouldn't. Thinking in black and white has been the sole
>> reason for many many attrocities[...]
>
>
> maybe that wasn't the best example, but dichotomies are still a
> thing. not everything is a gradient, and we should be more judicious
> in finding the right model for the situation. ironically, by ruling
> out the possibility of a dichotomy you have fallen victim of bad
> black-and-white thinking. black-and-nothing-else thinking, in fact.
>

Yes indeed dichotomies can exist in certain things. But on a hardware
piece... nah

>> You don't change someone's world view in one fell swoop, you do it 1%
>> at a time. [...]  So it is my personal opinion that the FSF should
>> find a different speaker that can understand his/her audience better
>> than rms does.
>
>
> well, there are some. have you listened to John Sullivan's talks? they
> are geared towards attracting the general FLOSS audience to the libre
> side of things. perhaps what we need is more people willing to educate
> the public with the strategy of their choice.
>
> different strokes for different folks. i would have never jumped on
> board with 1% increases. the whole enterprise would have struck me as
> vague and poorly thought. moreover, it wouldn't matter how out from
> the overton window free software is. we would still need RMS' clear
> referent to not lose sight of what the end goal is.
>
> RMS can't possibly adopt different strategies without being berated
> for inconsistency. and from a purely practical perspective, he
> probably knows that he will never speak to the same audience twice,
> which means that results will be maximum when those few all-or-nothing
> daredevils are targeted.
>

I haven't watched any FSF talks about their philosophy for a while. I
understand their train of thought although rms was a rough
introduction on it. I will check John Sullivan. And yes rms is a very
important figure. He is on a tricky situation as he is probably under
constant fire so he has to remain rigid. But it is a good thing that
ubuntu exists and ships with wifi and gpu blobs. Without them I would
have just reinstalled windows on my first try and never go any
further. As it stands right now fsf endorsed distros can only run on a
very limited number of hardware( such as the purism and the minifree
laptops). So without ubuntu and fedora( which I'm currently using) I
would have never been able to even learn about free software. And
there is no way I would have bought a new laptop, no matter how cheap
to try that weird thing called linux if it didn't work on my existing
one( well half of my hardware was broken at the beginning but still...
it could boot).