Todd's entire company is one big fraud. He had been intentionally vague and
deceitful from the beginning of this venture. For those who don't understand
the details it looks like he's pushing things forward. The problem is he
isn't and doesn't honestly care about the issues he's purporting to care
about. The evidence is all over the place and very clear to those
knowledgeable about the issues.
Originally his design called for including an NVIDIA graphics chip. There was
never any chance of the code being released or the chip being supported by
the free driver. Todd basically wrote it off saying you don't need the
proprietary driver and that it would increase sales. If you include a chip
when you don't absolutely have to your promoting proprietary software in
contradiction to your claims. It's that simple. The NVIDIA graphics chip
would never have worked on Trisquel. So either he would have included a
proprietary driver in contradiction to his claims or he would have shipped
something that didn't work.
He's also implied that he's talked to Intel about getting code released in
crucial components. These talks were little more than speaking to a sales rep
at an Intel event. There was never any genuine talk with Intel. Sales reps
are going to tell you what you want to hear and won't understand what your
talking about. The whole thing was basically just to fabricate this image
that he's done something to "make progress" on the issue.
In theory if this was done right there may be some benefits to designing a
laptop more from the ground up. However the last thing your going to do is
build off Intel/AMD. While you'll probably end up with chips that need
non-free software to fully utilize it's an unavoidable situation. The key
word being fully utilize. You'd gain in that you don't need a proprietary
BIOS or bootloader, but you'd lose having full support one particular
component. With Todd's laptop the NVIDIA component was avoidable even though
the BIOS was not. Had he not included the NVIDIA chip then it might have
about as free as what we sell at ThinkPenguin.
The coreboot inclusion is also a farce. I've been told from people who
received the laptop it's just a standard AMI BIOS. Prior to this there was
some talk about him using coreboot as a payload to running a proprietary
BIOS. It doesn't get rid of the proprietary BIOS at all. At best it's
something maybe an "open source" advocate or maybe a proprietary software
advocate would champion. Not a free software advocate as all this does is
maybe add functionality- but does nothing for freedom. The reason he is
doing/would be doing this though is to give people the impression that he's
done something to free the laptop. He hasn't.
