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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 Are these outdated specs worth your privacy and freedom?"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.
Is the harddrive running open-source firmware too? How could I possibly store my data on a device that uses proprietary software?
...like "Made in China."
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Creating free replacements for all non-free software is a monumental task that started many years ago, one that may never be complete. However, this is a milestone; the list of laptop models that are "truly free" can only expand from here, as can the includeable software. Have you seen the DD-WRT compatibility list recently? It was quite short a when that project was getting started.
> 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!
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.
Unfortunately, "the Market" means "whoever has the most dollars," which are concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite of anti-freedom oligarchs. If you want to keep your privacy and freedom, you'll need to find better allies than "the Market," because Gates, Zuckerberg et al. "outvote" you (likely millions to one). Markets do not protect freedoms, aside from the freedom of oligarchs to rule unimpeded.
...what can you do on it besides run gcc?
Run emacs. If you can run emacs, you shouldn't need anything else
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.
> 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.
Have you tried looking at the wiki? 1-click installs for all the blobs
Doesn't that violate an Amazon patent? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
> 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.