Re: [GNU-linux-libre] review PureOS ISO

[Francois Téchené]

Hello,

My name is François Téchené, I am director of creative at Purism. I am
also co-founder of the Ethic Cinema organization (ethiccinema.org) which
promotes free cinematographic art.

I have been reading through this discussion and I can understand the
point of view of the FSF. I can also understand that you don't know who
we are and are septic about our true intentions.

Here at Purism, we are software freedom supporters and we do share your
philosophy. We work every day to promote software freedom and make more
people be aware about ethics in the digital world. we are a small
company founded by the people through various crowd-foundings.

As a company, we also want to exist in the current system. We believe
that marginalizing ourselves and our customers by selling computers that
are far from matching the average user's expectations in term of speed
and ease of use is making the game of those who are working against the
ethics, as we would exclude many potential users straight away.

In that regard, we are doing our best to make modern computers that are
as free as it can be. We have been working very hard in trying to free
the BIOS and managed to have the Librem run with a fully free bios for
30 minutes as there is a watchdog in the CPU that powers off the
computer if the ME is not there. We have been communicating a lot on
this goal and we keep looking for solutions. We are very transparent on
this matter and our users are aware of this last step we wish to achieve.

However, if it is indeed impossible to free our Intel CPU's we won't
give up our goal of fully free hardware. We wish a large audience to
support us for our philosophy in the first place. This is a long term
plan of course but imagine millions of Librem users having a Librem as
an intention to own their computer and get back their digital freedom?
It would help us achieve this fully free hardware goal much more easily
as it would show that there is a real market for freedom. We are not
attached in any way to Intel and this potential market could help the
development of a powerful free CPU. Some of them already exist, we just
wish to help them. We are planning to make a fully free phone based on
that kind of fully free CPU.

I know that most people do care about their freedom, I know that this
people is the one currently making the biggest concession by giving up
their rights to big companies. I also know that we will never be able to
target such a market with marginal computers.

That being said about the computers we sell, please let us know the
exact steps we need to achieve to get endorsed?

From my understanding here are the steps :

- Disable the ability to use extensions in our version of Firefox
(PureBrowser)

- Make a website dedicated to PureOS only avoiding any reference to
Purism and the Librem.

(If you still think that we are promoting evil through our computers and
don't think that there are some intermediate steps to get to freedom,
then I don't share your point of view but I respect that.)

- Remove any FSF forbidden words from the PureOS website.

I guess that if the PureOS website has no link to the Purism website and
only exposes ISO download as a way to install, you see no objection in
having Purism help their users getting to freedom by shipping PureOS
pre-installed in their Librem? If you force us using another OS for
that, it would be a non-sense IMHO.


Do you see anything else?



Thanks a lot for everything you do anyway, I am a true supporter of the FSF.

Regards,


On 11/10/2016 01:57 PM, Julie Marchant wrote:
> On 11/10/2016 03:34 AM, hellekin wrote:
>> As suggested, your best bet now that the whole discussion is ingrained
>> with LibreM notebooks, is to find a replacement chip for the BIOS that's
>> compatible with Libreboot.  I gather this is not at all possible, and
>> you're still working on having the manufacturer free the chip you're
>> using.  Good luck with that.
> 
> The idea of getting Intel to free it is impossible. Full explanation here:
> 
> https://libreboot.org/faq/#librem
> 
> The only solution is to decouple PureOS from the sale of the "Librem"
> laptops.
> 

-- 
François Téchené

Director of Creative @Purism

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