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Free Software Foundation Endorses a "Truly Free" Laptop
An anonymous reader writes "The Free Software Foundation announced today the first laptop they have been able to certify as-is that respects the user's freedoms. The laptop is free down to using Coreboot in place of a proprietary BIOS. The OS shipped on the laptop is Trisquel, the Ubuntu derived Linux OS that removes all traces of proprietary firmware, patented formats, etc. The only issue though for new customers is this endorsed laptop comes down to being a refurbished 2006 ThinkPad X60 with single or dual-core Intel CPU, 1GB+ of RAM, 60GB+ HDD, and a 1024x768 12.1-inch screen, while costing $320+ USD (200 GBP). The FSF-certified refurbished laptops are only offered for sale through the Gluglug UK shop. Are these outdated specs worth your privacy and freedom?"
I support the FSF, but I can really just install free software on my own computers. This even includes coreboot usually. And they're a lot less expensive and a lot more powerful. I suppose it might be good to buy if your child needs a laptop or something.
Seriously. I laughed.
Your privacy can be compromised with open hardware, just as easily as with closed.
Freedom I see, however.
What is the point without free and open hardware too?
...what can you do on it besides run gcc?
Mind you, I'm not being a troll, nor am I dismissing the principles behind what they're doing. However, I am wondering how long it'll stay 'pure' before the user realizes "hey, I can't run $favorite_item, even though it normally runs fine on Linux!"
I suspect that those few who bother will likely give up and park Ubuntu/Fedora/SomethingElse on it in very short order.
(won't even touch on the fact that it's an older spec...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too? How could I possibly store my data on a device that uses proprietary software?
This path the FSF has taken to "create" a FLOSS system is not a bad one.
Instead of needing to manufacture a new laptop, simply "refurbish" an existing model and gauge your target market.
If the demand grows, newer models may be refurbished until it's economically viable to manufacture some.
I believe the "truly free" system here is just a model of what the FSF would like to see available in the market and not an actual business plan to compete in the marketplace to sell computers.
...like "Made in China."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
> no understanding of the importances of "just works"
That's not their part of the job.
Various entities can label something as user-friendly. FSF is pretty much the only entity that can label stuff as free.
This is one laptop. Hopefully next year there'll be twenty, and then someone can take on the job of announcing which is the most user-friendly of the twenty free laptops.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Are these outdated specs worth your privacy and freedom?
No - but the Market will ultimately decide that.
no, it is not. the FSF endorsed this laptop specifically because it runs without the blobs for CPU and VGA (or anything else)
I paid $200 for a Thinkpad T60 refurb (yes, a refurb, but you know, it hasn't faltered once). Comparable specs, faster CPU, less money. Not to mention this still isn't open hardware. I did have to strip whichever version of Windows came with it (didn't even look) and replace it with Debian, but it's been a quite a fine machine for work. (Programming, which doesn't exactly require a beast of a machine most of the time. Wowie! Look at that text editor go!)
Yeah, RMS goes w/ Loongson, so since the FSF is putting this together, why don't they just team up w/ Lemote, slap Trisquel (or gNewSense) on the laptop, fire it up w/ GNOME3, and put it out to market? Better yet, if they can find someone to fab the OpenRISC chip, or come out w/ an GPLed version of a SPARC (where its HDL designs are GPLed) and fab it, and design it into a laptop, w/ coreboot, they'll get what they want.
Remember, for an FSF endorsement, it doesn't need to be good, or even run end user software. It just needs to 'respect your freedom & privacy', so the solution above should do it.
unless you can put modified versions of software onto the hardware, the FSF doesn't care about it. so, unless the firmware is somehow flashable on the keyboard, hard drivfe, etc, that isn't an issue (at least to them). as for the microcode on cpu, in this case, it is modifiable and free.
That's a definition of fundamentalism, it certainly isn't the definition of fundamentalism that is common short-hand for extremist asshole. The FSF does not qualify for the extremist asshole definition, not by a long shot.
The hardware is perfectly usable for basic stuff, but it's absurdly expensive! That hardware costs about $100-$120 refurbished.
I don't respond to AC's.
> Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too?
A disingenuous double attack.
First: "Since I can't be perfect, why should I make any effort at all?"
The article says:
The free software operating system preloaded on the refurbished X60 is Trisquel GNU/Linux, the Ubuntu derivative backed by the FSF that ships without any proprietary software or firmware options.
So tell me again who is being disingenous?
Second: "FSF is has compromised! that makes them insincere"
The answer is that no, the hd firmware isn't open. Like the firmware of a microwave or common wristwatch, it's probably impossible to put new firmware on it, and it's probably not a problem.
A line has to be drawn somewhere, so FSF's line is: if the software (including firmware) can be updated, it must be free. The philosophy is that if it's complex or important, then the vendor will create a way to update the firmware. If the firmware can't be updated, then the code is probably sufficiently mundane as to be ignored, just as circuits are ignored.
Why say it has "no proprietary firmware" when it clearly does?
Firmware is available for many (most?) hard drives. I'm not sure why that makes it difference -- if that particular laptop didn't allow BIOS updates, would it be ok to advertise it as not having proprietary firmware? Is it somehow better that not only is the firmware no accessible in the hard drive, but the entire API is secret so you have no idea what it's doing? Maybe it scans the hard drive at night looking for your secret data and it uses its DMA access to poke that data into operating system TCP buffers. Any device with DMA access can be a security threat.
And why do you keep saying probably? If there's a chance that proprietary firmware could be a problem, then shouldn't they tell me that?
The lesson is: never try. If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing. You just stick that laptop in the closet next to your shortwave radio your karate outfit and your unicycle and we'll go inside and watch TV. What's on you ask? It just doesn't matter.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
All hard drives these days have firmware update software available.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is a way to update keyboard firmware via software, since that would make manufacturing/production testing easier.
Well, that's stupid. Microcode updates are intimately tied to the CPU architecture and stepping, and are not really code in the sense that you probably think of it. Microcode "programs" parts of the CPU on a very low level, much lower than even assembly. If you don't trust the microcode, how can you trust the CPU itself?
> no understanding of the importances of "just works"
That's not their part of the job.
Various entities can label something as user-friendly. FSF is pretty much the only entity that can label stuff as free.
This is one laptop. Hopefully next year there'll be twenty, and then someone can take on the job of announcing which is the most user-friendly of the twenty free laptops.
I'd take issue with them nominating themselves as the one true source, but that's neither here nor there. The real question is whether people will be willing to pay exorbant prices for relatively ancient hardware on the grounds that it very slightly increases the amount of "freedom" they have. Given that 99.95% of people will have no idea what this is about and further wouldn't care if they did (as we're talking about an increase that is difficult if not impossible to measure and arguably doesn't exist) I wouldn't hold your breath on this becoming anything more than an isolated instance.
In short, unless one can prove that even a tiny percentage of computer BIOSes and the like are phoning home or contacting the NSA with daily activity reports exactly no one, on the grand scale, will care. It reminds me of all the efforts to create a "free" CPUs or graphics cards in the past. Sure, you could do it and have them as long as you're okay with 10 or 15 year old technology that is incapable of doing anything that is currently useful. But it's Free! :D
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
Well that's a little different, a registered user trolling an AC! What's next, cats chasing dogs?
"Asshole?" No. "Extremist?" I'd say so. (But that's a feature, not a bug!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah, and that position is just lunacy. Stallman complains about JS in Google Docs taking half a megabyte, minified. How large would it be unminified, with comments and all? It's not like there aren't any tools to do so if you wish. Fill in the variable names as you please and you should be able to "de-obfuscate" the script quite easily, debug it Firebug or whatever you wish. There is a very clear technical reason for minifying JS, it's beneficial both for the server and the client. While I appreciate some of the foundations laid by Stallman/FSF, nowadays they just seem to be crackpots with no connection to reality (see the this article for example - give a substitute for Youtube as a present, WTF?).
So I've got one person replying to me saying FSF is too "fundamentalist", and I've got you saying they're too lax and are letting too much slip through.
I'm not saying they are too lax - I know there are no open source hard drive firmwares (though there is some progress on Open SSD firmware). I'm saying that they are being unclear on what they are delivering, they are saying "No proprietary firmware" when they know that portions of the computer do have
The general theme is that some people will look for even the smallest error just to avoid acknowledging good work.
Why do I say "probably" in my previous post? Because you and I don't know what the firmware in our microwaves do. It's probably fine. There haven't been any big microwave firmware scandals that I'm aware of. (And if I didn't say "probably", you'd say "How can you know?!")
Why do you keep comparing hard drive firmware with microwave firmware? My microwave doesn't see every bit of data I store on my hard drive, nor does it have full access to the physical RAM of my computer.
You keep saying "probably" because you really don't know what the hard drive firmware is doing. Which is fine, but don't dismiss it with "Well no one knows what it's doing and besides you can't do anything about it, so just ignore it".
Regarding FSF's statement, they said "no proprietary firmware options". Options. Whatever firmware could be removed has been removed.
Ahh, so there's no proprietary firmware except for the parts that use proprietary firmware. Well that's crystal clear and not misleading at all.
Is the HDD firmware a problem? I don't know. I don't know personally, and I don't know what FSF's take on it is.
If you feel that proprietary software infringes on your rights, how could closed source HDD firmware not be a problem?
But even if you did find some flaw, the right thing to do is say "Well, FSF is definitely 95%, and well done to them for their effort, but I'd like some discussion on this other 5%".
I might be willing to give them more credit if it was clear why they are promoting a computer that has open source software and open source BIOS, but the CPU and peripherals have proprietary embedded software and no one really knows what it does. How could I even give them 95% credit when I don't even know what the goal is or how what they've done so far meets the goal - how would that 95% be measured? If the system can't function without a hard drive and the hard drive runs proprietary software, are they really 95% close to a free and open solution?
In reality, it doesn't matter since few people will want to purchase a 7 year old laptop just because it is "open" - but it doesn't really help the FSF much when they endorse an "open" product that's really not open.
I actually bought one of these laptops used on fleaBay two years ago. I'm currently running Arch and Fluxbox (yeah yeah I know...) on it and it's snappy as hell. Takes all of 2 seconds for my desktop to come up, and I've dropped the thing on concrete from four feet up TWICE and it still works flawlessly (besides a few dings here and there). It runs everything I throw at it fairly flawlessly, but then again I don't game or do anything like that.
Well why would you write comments that disagree anyway?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Why do people still think that taking an antique computer and adding Linux is such an amazing thing?
This is a 7 year old laptop - and while someone may have replaced all the batteries with new ones, dismantled it and cleaned the internals with an air duster, and cleaned up the case it's still a diverted piece of e-waste.
Charging people $320 for something that probably cost them less than $50 to acquire is gouging - especially when people have problems with them.
I assume your time is worth nothing and the new batteries are free.
A long time ago (like, 1994), on the linuxnet irc network, there was this guy named _Joe_ that claimed he was going to build boards around the Dec Alpha chip that would be dedicated Linux workstations.
We were all salivating.
So far as I know, it never happened, (sadly).
But I always wondered about it -- in the early days of Linux, most of the people working on it were used to using proprietary unix hardware with proprietary unixes. We were clearly willing to use non-windows compatible hardware if it made sense.
It's somewhat surprising to me that "designed for Linux" workstations aren't more popular. On the low end, you have things like the Pi, but that's not necessarily setup to be a general purpose workstation. On the high end, you have the older Silicon Graphics big iron that was designed for Linux. Not really "normal workstation" material, and not by any means open hardware/software.
I guess what I am curious about is that given the level of talent in the F/OSS community, why there doesn't seem to be a clear market participant that builds "Linux compliant" workstations and servers, including preferring chipsets that have open hardware and open firmware. And why isn't there an industry around designing those open cores and writing firmware for them?
Being a fabless hardware company is easier than ever; where's the open source hardware platform that I _know_ doesn't have strange reliability issues (like the random MSI board I bought a few years back), doesn't leak RF/audio all over the place (like the Packard Bell my friend grew up with), and has 100% of its hardware well supported by in-box kernel drivers?
The last few motherboards I've purchased from Newegg have all had subtle defects with them. I'd rather pay a bit more for a board where I knew that the people behind it weren't looking to cut costs but were instead looking to make a product they'd be happy to depend on day-in and day-out, and that part of that guarantee was that the board was widely used by the community and was made of open components that didn't have obsolescence designed in.
That organization or those products may exist already, but its hard to tell who is selling a Rolls Royce vs. who is selling a lemon. If you go by reviews from places like Newegg, there isn't necessarily a correlation between brand and quality or price and quality.
Does anyone have suggestions?
(As an aside, I'm happy with the Raspberry Pi I bought. But it's clearly not a workstation replacement. Similarly, I'm happy with the Alix PCEngine I bought years ago to run my openBSD edge device. That custom hardware has worked very, very well. But it's not a general purpose workstation either)
I guess my contention is that while I cannot afford SGI prices, I can (and will) pay more for something that I have a reasonable assurance of getting strong community support for. Who wants my money? :)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
> And none of those things were done by the FSF itself.
We have a GUI desktop because FSF launched four projects to make one.
The first became GNUstep (a success, but not enoughso), the second didn't produce a desktop but did produce Guile.
Then KDE was launched, with the then-proprietary QT toolkit. The problem was so urgent that FSF launched two projects to fix it, GNOME and Harmony. Harmony was a project to replace the QT toolkit, but it wasn't a success.
GNOME was a success. So much of a success that it was, IMO, what lead to QT being freed. So we've FSF to thank for directly making GNOME, and indirectly for licence changes in QT.
(And then there's the fact that FSF made the developer tools and licences which helped a lot of other projects come into being.)
But as usual, people try to avoid crediting FSF, so a lot of people don't know this.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Then KDE was launched, with the then-proprietary QT toolkit. The problem was so urgent that FSF launched two projects to fix it, GNOME and Harmony. Harmony was a project to replace the QT toolkit, but it wasn't a success.
Gnome wasn't started by the FSF itself, but by Miguel de Icaza While it has a recursive name referencing GNU it' isn't one of their projects. It uses the GTK tookit, which was created by a university, University of California at Berkeley, not the FSF. Besides, the Nautilus file manager was developed by a for-profit company called Eazel...look it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
Another for profit company founded by Icaza, Helix/Ximian also did much work on GNOME
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximian
GNOME was a success. So much of a success that it was, IMO, what lead to QT being freed. So we've FSF to thank for directly making GNOME, and indirectly for licence changes in QT.
That must be why in 2009, RMS called Miguel de Icaza a "Traitor to the Free Software Community"
But as usual, people try to avoid crediting FSF, so a lot of people don't know this.
Yes, the FSF and GNU project deserves some credit, for creating the tools, but beyond that...just beause those tools are used to create other things, doesn't mean we should kowtow to Stallman for every thing made using those tools.
The was RMS treated anyone who used the word "free" in asking a question certainly qualifies as arsehole but that's just one landmine to step over and move on. It got very boring after hearing it the twentieth time in interviews, just as the "linux? Never hurd of it?" joke got old after the third time in an evening when he was asked about linux.
The FSF and all the rest is thankfully a lot bigger than RMS so it's not worth focusing on a jealous guy that is annoyed that the movement he was involved in for years has got far too big for him to have any sort of major role in it any more. The two silly linux renaming attempts (LiGnuX then gnu/linux) got him some attention for a while but that has now faded.