On 06/09/2016 12:37 PM, Zlatan Todoric wrote: > They are promises for sure but not cheap ones made. It is all work in > progress and we are gathering great team and discussing a lot of things. > It is not easy to fight this and we choose our way of doing which > currently means sacrificing few things in order to grow but our > foundation doesn't change.
Who said the promises are "cheap"? Certainly not me. I said, and this is factually correct, that they were and still are promises you cannot keep. It is *impossible* to make any x86 CPU made after 2013 (including the ones used by the Purism laptops) respect your freedom, because they will not run without proprietary programs that are *cryptographically signed* by the manufacturer of the CPU, and even *Google*, one of the richest multi-national corporations in the world, could not convince Intel to cooperate with them. And yet, you promised to deliver a laptop which respects your freedom with such a CPU anyway. Either Purism is being run by idiots, or it is being run by scam artists, especially if you are going to continue to insist that you can make good on this impossible promise. Furthermore, what "progress" has Purism made? Let's break down the current version of that fancy, deceptive progress bar: * Everything up to and including "Bootloader Freed" is just a long-winded way of saying "completely libre OS". That was the GNU project and other projects like Linux, far predating Purism's existence as a company. * "FSF Distribution Endorsement" is either a goal for an OS, or a goal that was achieved by Ututo first. If the former, well, PureOS is not currently endorsed (although when it was based on Trisquel, you guys didn't have any problem deceptively mentioning that it's based on Trisquel and that Trisquel is FSF-endorsed, as if to imply that PureOS was FSF-endorsed by extension). If the latter, yeah, that was Ututo that solved the problem of no system being recommendable by the FSF, and that has nothing to do with Purism. * "Fuse CPU for Unsigned Binaries": Some technical thing I don't really understand, but people have commented that this is an extremely easy thing to do and not particularly significant. * "Coreboot BIOS Released": Yeah, Coreboot, or rather Shimboot, is running on PureOS. It was done by Coreboot volunteers; Purism had nothing to do with the effort. * "Drive Firmware Freed": Nice Engrish. But it's Think Penguin who worked with people who were inside Qualcomm Atheros to get essential wireless firmware liberated, and Intel made their integrated graphics controllers work without proprietary firmware of their own accord years ago. Purism did nothing to improve the situation here, which is still very bad and getting worse. Of course, all of this ultimately has no bearing on whether or not PureOS qualifies as a GNU FSDG distro. But Purism's record does justify being very cautious and thorough in the investigation of it, more so than e.g. LibertyBSD. -- Julie Marchant https://onpon4.github.io Protect your emails with GnuPG: https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org
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