Re: [GNU-linux-libre] DSFG in perpetuity

[François Téchené]

On 25/03/2018 19:56, Robert Call wrote:
> 
> What more did you expect when a project is started by a parent company
> and pushed for a discrete nvidia GPU for their crowdfunding campaign?
> Had it been a truly independent project, that would not have happened.
> Projects associated with a parent company always carry the baggage of
> the parent company.
> 

I think that there is some misunderstanding on what the Purism "plan" is
and has always been.

Purism has taken the problem in the other way around and I can
understand that it seems pretty confusing for freedom supporters.
Instead of starting from a fully free hardware, which is very limited in
choice, which requires a tremendous amount of resources to be improved,
and that is not always friendly to the average user, Purism has chosen
to start from a much more common hardware and work on freeing it.

Why doing that? Because nobody else has tried this approach yet and
because we think that it can succeed in being freedom respecting while
bringing freedom to the mass.

Bringing freedom to the mass is what, personally, bothers me the most. I
think that one very important aspect of a freedom respecting technology
is that it is not discriminating anyone, because there is no freedom on
something that one cannot access. A computer that is not matching the
average user's expectations (too technical, not convenient enough,
limited in resources) is discriminating a large part of the population,
no matter how much "educating" about free software we do. This is a fact
and it is not acceptable.

You may not agree with our vision but please, don't judge Purism on what
it started from but what it is going towards instead. See how the Librem
improved in term of freedom since its first version. We keep working on
freeing the BIOS, reverse engineering the remaining blobs and we push
all this work upstream to coreboot. Just like we push PureOS development
to Debian as much as we can. This is just a start. In the long term, we
would love to get enough financial resources to push the development of
truly free technologies like RISC V. Being RYF certified with convenient
modern hardware is on our road-map.

Again, you may no agree with our approach and you are free to have
different ideas on how to manufacture freedom respecting computers _for
everyone_ (I insist). In this case, go ahead, start a project or
contribute to an existing project that is aligned with your ideas and
prove that we were wrong because we may be.

At the end of the day, no matter who was wrong or right in the way to
get there as long as we manage to get there => "freedom for everyone"

Cheers,

-- 
François Téchené
Director of Creative @ Purism