Just a quick comment about free software. While most distributions/projects
are based on free software very few are honest about the freedom bit. Pretty
much everyone ignores freedom for the sake of convenience. Both projects and
companies. There are all of two companies I'd buy from when it comes to
hardware. One is ThinkPenguin and the other is lulzbot. :) Yes- I'm the CEO
of the first. Of distributions which respect your freedom there are roughly
eight. Most companies/distributions are shipping with non-free software or
selling hardware thats dependent on non-free software.
Some of the biggest red flags that a company is not really freedom friendly:
they ship computers with Intel wireless cards (there are no free
drivers/firmware for these cards) or have nVidia graphics cards. There is one
exception from nVidia and it is no thanks to nVidia. There is a reverse
engineering project to produce a driver. The one chipset that is sufficent to
use is quite old. Sufficent for most users although not to be found in your
laptops or modern desktops. We're the only company that offers systems with
it-so..
And even of those shipping with Trisquel the hardware may not work! When I've
mentioned various issues about Intel wireless cards not being compatible or
nVidia chipsets I've basically gotten shurgged off. They don't care. 99% of
people don't know/or don't care and it's more about publicity for them than
freedom. While I'll admit we sell very little hardware to free software users
comparitively I care enough to make sure we don't use chipsets that are
hostile to users freedom. If nobody cares we will always be at the mercy of
companies which make things difficult. And most people don't even understand
the problems introduced by non-free code. This includes the developers half
the time.
