Purism Librem 13 Funded, But Will Likely Fail To Provide Freedom & Privacy

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Librem 13 Funded, But Will Likely Fail To Provide Freedom & Privacy

While not quite as much as the funding achieved for the Librem 15, the smaller Librem 13 crowd-funding campaign is set to close soon and has just passed its $250k USD funding goal for "a laptop that respects your rights", but there's still a lot of yet to be fulfilled hopes riding on this x86 laptop...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Purism-Librem-13-250k-Fund

[Luke_Wolf]

I don't even care about this laptop, but the author of that email can take a long walk off a short pier, only an FSF nut would be that short sighted as to fail to understand we're talking some small no-name company that is lucky that it has even as much leverage as it currently has to do anything at all. They really couldn't give the author what he wants even if they wanted to in their current state. Instead he should at least be happy that there's *any* movement at all in this direction, as the niche involved doesn't care enough to spend 250k on this kickstarter.

[soulsource]

It might be a chicken and egg problem... Free software purists will only back projects that have a realistic chance to become fully free (including firmware that's loadable at runtime...), and hardware companies have little incentive to develop such a system when other, less ambitious projects, don't get enough support.

(Regarding firmware: I don't see that a big difference between loading binary only firmware from an EEPROM chip, and loading binary only firmware from a file on a HDD... But well, Richard Stallman has a different opinion on the topic...)

[chithanh]

It's not just "FSF nuts" who think that it is impossible to trust a modern Intel system.

The free software community has been trying for years to make Intel more friendly to non-proprietary firmware. But the exact opposite has happened. There is more blobs, code-signing and things that happen behind the operating system's back than ever before.

I think the community would support Librem more if they were making actual progress towards that goal. But their chosen path is not going to lead anywhere. Coupled with their advertising claims that convey the impression that the laptop is going to run free software when it is actually not, you can see why many have a low opinion of that company.

Edit
soulsource
I think PROM, EPROM are ok. EEPROM is not.

[Passso]

I do not understand why I can read this kind of arrogant and extremist text on Phoronix.

Ok there is one point (the bios) technically hard (impossible?) to make free, so the product is just 99.99% free... but flooding such a hate on a quite good project is a shame, why put this on this site???

[tomtomme]

I do not understand why I can read this kind of arrogant and extremist text on Phoronix.

Ok there is one point (the bios) technically hard (impossible?) to make free, so the product is just 99.99% free... but flooding such a hate on a quite good project is a shame, why put this on this site???

if the bios is not free, the system is more like 50% free.
And how did you manage to read this article as a "arrogant", "extremist", "hate" filled one. The author even congratulated the librem team for the successful campaign. He just detailed the problems on delivering the promised 100% free product and asked them to "rethink" their goals / communication. Nothing more nothing less.

[andrei_me]

problems on delivering the promised 100% free product .

This, is just like when Canonical came with Mir and spread BS about Wayland, it backfired to them, so when Librem said that it would be 100% free instead of as free as possible/feasible, it backfired too

[soulsource]

chithanh Oh, maybe I misread something. That actually sounds a lot more reasonable.

[Passso]

And how did you manage to read this article as a "arrogant", "extremist", "hate" filled one. The author even congratulated the librem team for the successful campaign. He just detailed the problems on delivering the promised 100% free product and asked them to "rethink" their goals / communication. Nothing more nothing less.

IMO their whole text was sarcasm.

[Luke_Wolf]

It's not just "FSF nuts" who think that it is impossible to trust a modern Intel system.

The free software community has been trying for years to make Intel more friendly to non-proprietary firmware. But the exact opposite has happened. There is more blobs, code-signing and things that happen behind the operating system's back than ever before.

I think the community would support Librem more if they were making actual progress towards that goal. But their chosen path is not going to lead anywhere. Coupled with their advertising claims that convey the impression that the laptop is going to run free software when it is actually not, you can see why many have a low opinion of that company.

Edit
soulsource
I think PROM, EPROM are ok. EEPROM is not.

The author's goal posts are not "it's impossible to trust a modern intel system" the author's goal posts are "Must be 100% Free Including down to using Libreboot instead of coreboot!!!!!!1111" which means that yes... we are just talking FSF nuts and a goal that is effectively impossible in the x86 sphere. If the author truly cares that much about his BIOS, he should be using a Sun SPARC system instead.