I need to work/study now not tomorrow.
You can install the proprietary firmware now and change it tomorrow. The
whole thing is to see proprietary software as a problem and do something to
solve it. A transition is necessary.
In this one lenovo x220 laptop it was (at first) the wireless thing, but then
was also the bluetooth not working and (forgot to mention also) the mouse
pointer was very unstable, always shaking,etc.
There are bluetooth adapter that work with free software too. I very much
doubt the "shaking pointer" has anything to do with Trisquel not shipping the
proprietary software in Linux.
I thing that is a lost battle!
If too little people enter the battle, pretending it is lost before it is
fought, then we will lose for sure. Do you have any other approach to
propose to get hardware that users control down to its firmware?
I ask how many of us don't use smartphone, or have a google account, see
youtube,etc, etc.
I do not own a cell phone, I kept my GMail account but do not use it anymore
(I have received one single e-mail there since the beginning of the month vs.
551 in the box I actually use), I download some YouTube videos/audios with
ViewTube, which does not execute any proprietary software (including
JavaScript).
But where I am or where you are does not matter much. Like I wrote above, a
(year-long) transition is needed for the switch to free software to be
successful. What matters is to always see proprietary software as a problem
to solve and actually try to solve it, rather than saying "it is a lot
battle" and embrace proprietary software.
Have we so sure that other projects in the free software repos don't use
proprietary software? who is checking if there are no time for it?
As the youtube-dl example shows: anybody can and the whole community takes
advantage of her work.
At the end is just conceptual (...) I will never have time to confirm if it
is or not, because we all have limited time, limited personnel,limited
resources, and limited knowledge.
We all do. But that is not "just conceptual". Freedom 3 works in practice:
the users collectively control the software. Whenever somebody studies the
program, she is free to share her discoveries with the whole community.
Whenever anybody modifies that program (to fix a bug, including a freedom
issue, add a feature, etc.), anybody in the community can switch to this
version. The Trisquel project does that for instance: it corrects freedom
issues in Ubuntu's package, but also adds packages, etc. and we, Trisquel
users, chose Trisquel over Ubuntu.
They can't spy us all
Governments, that companies cannot insult, can. If almost everbody is a
client of the company (Google, Facebook, etc.), the company can spy on almost
everybody too.
if they do it they would risk the bankruptcy
Not with today's laws in most of the world (that companies write and that do
not protect privacy much).
or have to change their trade to maybe espionage, or something; which maybe
it is not more profitable than what they do.
Selling personal profiles to marketing departments (to show personalized
adds) and to governmental agencies apparently makes a lot of money. Today,
Google is the most valuable company and that is almost all its money-making
activity. ISPs now want to abuse the users' privacies in the same way (in
the USA and the rest of the world) to get a part of the pie...
with not very ethical prices!
That is only an issue unless to those who cannot afford to pay the price,
i.e., almost nobody given that the person has a laptop.
A better solution was someone with knowledge, concentrate the information on
how to make a laptop, or a desktop, which are the parts, that work entirely
well with free-software; which are the laptops that works with free-software;
and let us assembly the machines.
We have that for refurbished laptops: Libreboot's laptops (and the
documentation on how to install Libreboot on them). For new laptops, the
problem is harder (because neither Intel nor AMD cooperates) but is tackled
(EOMA68 comes to mind). But, again, if almost all users say the battle is
lost, refuse to pay more for the additional work to get freedom-respecting
hardware, and, as a consequence, buy any laptop, then the battle will indeed
be lost.
