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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] [Dev] Misleading information in EOMA68 news


From: Christopher Waid
Subject: Re: [libreplanet-discuss] [Dev] Misleading information in EOMA68 news
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2016 13:18:54 -0400

On 2016-08-24 06:25 AM, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
Le mardi 23 août 2016 à 11:24 -0300, Adonay Felipe Nogueira a écrit :
Just now, I **have** subscribed to Parabola's dev mailing list. So I'll
try to catch-up with this topic. :)

I'm inserting libreplanet-discuss and trisquel-users mailing lists as
recipients of this email because of my opinion on Tiberiu-Cezar
Tehnoetic's message
(<https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-August/004353.html>).

I'm also inserting a member of ThinkPenguin as recipient so as to let
him know the issue found by Tiberiu-Cezar Tehnoetic, which is discussed
furthermore in this email.

I agree with Paul Kocialkowski's original message
(<https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-August/004341.html>).
Furthermore, my **last** edit in the original pad
(<https://pad.riseup.net/p/parabola-news-libre-tea-computer>) is perhaps
the most correct one (if the timeslider references don't change over
time, it should be
<https://pad.riseup.net/p/parabola-news-libre-tea-computer/timeslider#2238>, 
saved July 24th, 2016. After this version, the misleading text gets 
added).

Feel free to contribute to the revision pad:
https://pad.partidopirata.com.ar/p/parabola-eoma

Others: what do you think of this version? Please acknowledge when you think
it's ready. At this point, revision 310 suits me fine:
https://pad.partidopirata.com.ar/p/parabola-eoma/timeslider#310

However, I would gladly skip the part following "However, it's important to note that:". Providing details there seems like a very slippery slope and I'd rather link to relevant posts or information from the campaign page. Better yet,
quoting parts from there would be even more appropriate.

For instance, "2D and video acceleration work well with free software", while being true, is not precise enough to be a really useful information. Also, the part about the circuit board is too vague, since only the EOMA68 card (and not
the landing board or laptop board) were said to be withheld.

About Tiberiu-Cezar Tehnoetic's message
(<https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-August/004353.html>):
Indeed, the use of "free software friendly" to also mean "fully free
software" or "freedom-respecting" is a communication noise (article on
Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_noise>).
Basically, in context of marketing (not sales), a communication noise
happens when **either** the senders or receivers of a message
distort-or-misunderstand the message.

Besides, I'm inserting a member of ThinkPenguin as recipient of this
email so as to let him know the issue that Tiberiu-Cezar Tehnoetic found in ThinkPenguin's website content. This was done so as to make it easier
for ThinkPenguin to see the issue. This **is not** meant to be taken
offensively.

They may agree that it's an issue or not. I don't think it is one.
For the record, you're probably referring to "Company #2" from:
https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-August/004353.html

If the world were perfect I might fix this imperfection immediately. Every small fix takes time though and time is not something we have. We can't afford to waste it on minor issues. We have many many small issues yet to deal with after eight years and many many much bigger issues. If it took a fine tooth comb to find an issue it's probably not worth dealing with [immediately].

When this text was written LibreBoot didn't exist and I was probably the only person who had even looked into the possibility of porting CoreBoot to newer systems or free'ing it [this was around 2009]. It also was the case that all the core components [chipsets, like wifi, graphics, etc] were free so within the context of the day it was adequately describing I think, even if not a perfect choice of words to the extant that anybody else would have understood them.

When I say big issues I'm talking about things like getting sources released for newer CPUs/SOCs, reverse engineering components, targeting the FCC so we can overcome restrictions on the release of and ability to get code [in practice], designing new hardware, etc.

If you understand and think about the underlying issues and start nit picking you'd quickly realize not only are we imperfect, but so is the wording on every other site. We still don't have any free laptops. Utilizing the word free to describe almost any laptop would be technically wrong [including systems with LibreBoot]. I can think of one exception and that is the Ben NanoNote [if this even counts as a laptop, I wouldn't call it that]. The next best thing is going to be the Libre Tea Computer Card when combined with the related laptop housing components [also free] and that's only happening because we've been sponsoring its development and working with Luke on it for years. Why this is better is because we have the complete set of code for numerous components including microcode, keyboard/LCD controller firmware, bootloader, and more... so yes.. we could go back and fix these ancient issues nobody has even noticed until now or we could just work on solving the problems so we can replace these not-quite-perfect systems with ones that are [which if I understand the issue should also solve said problems].





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