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On 09/25/2017 10:10 AM, Tomas Nordin wrote:
We can stick with thinking in terms of black and white when it comes to whether some software is free or not. It is either free or it isn't. The four freedoms make that easy.
Then it can be hard on people to call them lazy by not making sure their machines are 100 % RYF because of convenience. But escaping ms office is not hard, there is not much convenience to gain there in place of freedom, only lock-in. On the machine side I would guess political activism is what is required.
In some ways I agree, and in others I disagree here. No, it isn't always laziness to not have an RYF machine to work on. Whether anything, be it software, machine, or component of a machine is free or not is a black and white issue. A whole machine, however, or a whole distro, also has shades of grey.
One way to think of it to pull from the software side because there exists a better spectrum to reference, is to imagine all the OS/OS distros lined up along an 8-bit greyscale colour bar, grading by how much of the OS is free. If what you care about is fully free, then you're going to apply a threshold to that colour bar to find which ones are a suitable option. Nevertheless, someone running Debian or even Ubuntu, is, when you look at the greyscale version, obviously much closer to running free software than someone running Windows.
The same is true of machines. As pointed out, right now there isn't much of anything in modern-day technology for full-fledged desktop/laptop (I believe that's actually nothing) that is fully free, and the same for phones. It isn't everyone who has a viable option to use long-outdated hardware or do without a "smart" phone. Further, the chasm is in many cases too wide to bridge in a single leap.
Where I see the problem with Purism is that their advertising seems to try to sound further along than they really are in supplying RYF-grade hardware. ThinkPenguin, on the other hand, (from whom I bought my current laptop) appears to be providing hardware relatively similarly far from RYF, but because they make very clear what they do and don't have to offer, they have never to my knowledge, taken much heat for it. Paradoxically, if I've heard correctly, Purism has managed to free at least one relatively recent processor from Intel's ME, quite possibly due to the very controversy they have stirred up with their marketing.
As for how to get more free HW, I think efforts like Talos, EOMA, and even Purism and ThinkPenguin are the best way forward. I wish the FSF would do a bit more to promote upcoming hardware that can at least be expected to be a step beyond what is currently available. It is Talos in particular I'm thinking of here. When I wrote them after the close of the Talos campaign on Crowd Supply, they indicated that the FSF hadn't seemed very interested in working with them, and more interested in a legislative approach. I think this is a shame, because that kind of approach, if successful, is only going to get a lot of people mad at them. Figure out how to promote open hardware so that it ends up taking the market, and people will soon almost forget that the world used to be different.
These are my thoughts right now, and may be worth no more than you paid for them.
Tor
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