Chris, the overall problem in all of this is still that you are selling the
very kinds of systems that you are so critical of in public. You tell people
that we need to move to fully free systems, and criticize the libreboot
project for being a "dead end" focusing on certain hardware that you identify
to be a non-solution freedom-wise, all while you are selling systems on
ThinkPenguin that have *proprietary BIOS*.
If I were in your position, I would not be selling those laptops and desktops
that you sell. You are saying that the money raised helps fund future work on
free hardware, but at the same time you're also selling systems to people
that do not adequately respect their freedom, while preaching to people who
do supply such systems for being "imperfect".
This is why you're a hypocrite.
> recommending Debian and Fedora was a mistake.
I came to the same conclusion, and stopped that. It was a temporary error of
judgement, and you know it.
The reason was, that we considered ChromeOS to be the worst possible choice:
it invades privacy (SaaSS web services), while coming with proprietary
software. We wanted to recommend to people the least evil replacement, since
there are currently no FSF-endorsed distributions available on ARM. The idea
was, that this would lessen the problem.
It was decided that it didn't matter how "lesser evil" another non-endorsed
distro was, that it was still just as bad. We decided instead to more
aggressively call for libre distros to be ported to ARM. I'm going to be
adding more ARM chromebooks to libreboot as a means to that end (more
hardware being available with libreboot means that there's more incentive to
port these distributions), which use the same rk3288 SoC as the ASUS C201.
I'll soon be contacting all of the major libre distro projects (Trisquel,
Guix, Parabola, etc) to see what can be done. I've contacted them already
about it, but I will keep trying again and again.
Mark Weaver of GuixSD is already interested. I talked to him about it at the
FSF30 day in Boston, MA. I also spoke to him on IRC about it before that, and
have spoken to him on IRC since. He says that the basic code is already
there, and Guix should easily be able to support ARM.
I contacted the Parabola project via their IRC channel, and it turns out that
they already do have ARM support for u-boot systems, so it should be trivial
to get them working with depthcharge (the payload that is used in
coreboot/libreboot on these laptops). I'll be trying this myself at the
earliest opportunity.
My contact with the Trisquel project has been inconclusive so far.
At present, Parabola and GuixSD look like they will be the first libre
distributions available on this hardware.
With this in mind, it's wrong of you to criticize libreboot for a mistake
that it no longer makes. As I said, recommending Debian/Fedora as a
"temporary" solution was a serious lapse in judgement which I quickly
rectified.
