[Arm-netbook] OT: Librem 5?

[Pen-Yuan Hsing]

(before I respond below, just full disclosure again: I didn't follow the 
Purism campaigns super closely so please feel free to correct me if I'm 
wrong on the *facts*!)

On 26/09/17 13:48, Bill Kontos wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 8:41 AM, Lauri Kasanen <cand at gmx.com> wrote:
>> You make a decent argument, however all the issues were pointed out to
>> them during the laptop campaigns again and again, and they did not
>> learn; they repeated them with this phone. That's willfull ignorance if
>> not outright malevolence.
>>
>> 1. They advertised the laptop as 100% free, when it could not be so due
>> to ME.
>> 2. They advertised it would ship with coreboot, when it did not until
>> several months after release.
>>
>> Deceptive advertising, and they repeated the same thing with the phone.
>> Even if we want somebody to succeed in a less-free device, do we want
>> them to be the people who willfully deceive in order to do so?

I certainly agree that people shouldn't "willfully deceive"! That said, 
there is a high bar for demonstrating **wilful** lying. This high bar is 
certainly true in many legal jurisdictions, and I think it's a good idea 
in general.

As far as I remember (and atm I really don't have time to check 
archive.org), when the Librem laptop campaigns first began, they already 
had that table in their campaign description saying the BIOS and Intel 
ME have not yet been freed, but everything else is. At the time it 
looked fairly clear to me that Purism wanted to make a 100%-libre laptop 
but there were still a few bits missing. It also seemed clear to me that 
they are working on freeing those bits.

One could certainly argue that Purism didn't *emphasise* the non-free 
bits, but to me there was no clear *wilful* lying because all the facts 
were on the campaign page.

Another important point is that this was a crowdfunding campaign, not a 
traditional sales page. And like other crowdfunding campaigns, Purism 
laid out what they wanted to achieve. And just like other crowdfunding 
campaigns, there is by default no 100% guarantee that everything the 
project sets out to do will be 100% achieved 100% on time. Maybe I'm 
strange for this, but when I pledge money for a crowdfunding campaign I 
know I am supporting the project to move towards a goal while conscious 
that sometimes not all the goals are 100% achieved.

And let's look at what Purism *has* achieved: They are now much closer 
to freeing the Intel ME on their laptops, certainly much closer than 
before their campaign started. This benefits everyone not just Purism, 
and I don't think this achievement is possible if no one supported their 
initial crowdfunding.

I agree Purism is likely far from perfect, but during the same period of 
time has anyone else achieved what Purism did? (honest question)

I'm a backer of the EOMA68 project and am super excited about what's 
being done here, but it's a different set of achievements from what 
Purism is working on.

But whatever Purism's real intentions, my main point isn't to defend them.

> Honestly I don't really care. I look at the end result. Their
> advertisement pisses me off to no end, but at least they got something
> done. As it stands right now they are the no.2 most free and secure
> laptop manufacturer out there. If our community is so twisted that we
> need someone to decieve us to get people reverse engineering the intel
> ME just to "show them" or whatever happened, then I say well deserved.
> So unless some engineer comes out libv-style with proof that "I spent
> x amount of my time for purism to take advantage of it and I got
> nothing in return" my purchase decision will not change. So far all
> that they lied about was the timeframe at which they would ship the
> features, but not the features themselves. So no biggie for me. Also
> in regards to RYF certification I remember rms saying he wished amd
> would burn their firmware blobs for their gpus to rom so they could
> grand RYF to their cards. Sounds a bit of a foolish way to grand RYF,
> but if purism follows the same idea( which according to the campaign
> page they intend to) they might actually get it.

I partly agree with Bill here.

To be clear: My point isn't to *specifically* defend Purism, though they 
have demonstrable achievements for software freedom.

My main point is that I feel the free software community *in general* is 
very hostile towards small steps that don't take us to 100% software 
freedom. If a laptop that's, say, 95%-libre is made by someone (doesn't 
have to be Purism), it is real progress and objectively better than a 
laptop that's 50% or even 0% libre.

I think our response to projects that make 95%-ish-libre (or even 75%) 
products shouldn't be "you are a terrible person!", it should be "great 
job for taking us a bit closer to software freedom, how do we work 
together to make it even better?"

This is what I think, and if you disagree on this main point (not 
specific to Purism) I'd honestly love to hear your opinion!