Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Purism is not free hardware

[Henry Jensen]

Am Fri, 09 Mar 2018 01:33:12 +0100
schrieb John Sullivan <johns@fsf.org>:

> "Taiidan@gmx.com" <Taiidan@gmx.com> writes:
> 
> > Again I still can't understand as to why purism gets so much air
> > time on the FSF website and the tech news media yet legitimately
> > libre hardware gets none.  
> 
> 
> > "PureOS" is simply a debian clone used to peddle non-free laptops
> > and now purism has obtained an implied endorsement from the FSF.  
> 
> That is not an accurate description. PureOS is an endorsed
> distribution because it has committed to upholding the Guidelines for
> Free System Distribution. It made a number of important changes from
> Debian in order to achieve that.

PureOS uses the same Linux kernel as Debian (i.e. not Linux-Libre),
which some people regard as a bug, because log messages like this
appear:

iwlwifi: 0000:03:00.0 firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-6000g2a-6.ucode

which indicates, that the kernel is looking for a non-free firmware
blob. By reading this message in the log file a user could learn about
it and be tempted to install this non-free software.


See also this thread:
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2017-12/msg00004.html

It was suggested, that this issue "was missed" when endorsing PureOS,
which I can't hardly imagine, because the used kernel is usually the
first thing to look at when reviewing a distro.


Regards,

Henry