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If this campaign is as sketchy as their laptop was, no thanks. I already don't trust them because of their misdirection in that project, they have a ton of good

If this campaign is as sketchy as their laptop was, no thanks. I already don't trust them because of their misdirection in that project, they have a ton of goodwill and trust to rebuild before they can be taken seriously. https://hackerfall.com/story/the-truth-about-purism-why-librem-is-not-the-same https://hackerfall.com/story/the-truth-about-purism-why-libr... http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960524/laptop-computers/why-linux-enthusiasts-are-arguing-over-purisms-sleek-idealistic-librem-laptops.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960524/laptop-computers/why-...

ZenoArrow 9y ago
Let's put it like this... many laptops can run a FLOSS operating system, but how many smartphones can you say the same about? There's only a handful I can think of, and most of those are no longer produced. Even if not every binary blob is removed, the opportunity to kickstart a FLOSS-based phone ecosystem is not one that comes along that often.
- rtpg 9y ago
  Android is Apache licensed. There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source. A lot of people enjoy replacing the lowest level of the system with OSS. But consumers only notice that afterwards they have nothing on the highest level. I think the Raspberry Pi took the right approach here accepting the binary blob GPU but having the software stack otherwise be free. They got adoption because things were useful! And now they "just" have to solve the GPU problem, instead of a "rewrite all software " problem. I would be very excited by people who could offer a "skin " over Android (with its own set of apps) so the higher level stuff could be tackled. Once that part of the stack is nice, swapping out the backend will be an even easier pitch. The counterpoints I can think of: - If you do not trust the backend, hard to have proper security. - People are doing what they want to do! Lots of people like writing kernel-y code more than a dialer UI
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    > "There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source." Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where Play Services were open source. How would this hold back Google from maintaining/growing their market share? As for developing for Android and swapping out the backend later, by that point your apps would be tied into the Android API calls, unless you intentionally make your apps cross-platform, at which point what do you gain from running Android? If it's just for the drivers then libhybris is an option. If you want the ability to run Android apps whilst you build up your own, this is something you can do with Sailfish OS, which you'll almost certainly be able to run on the Librem smartphone if it's released.
    - rtpg 9y ago
      My point about Play Services was that, despite Android being OSS, it is not sufficient to just set up AOSP. People still want to use apps, so you have to get a copy of Play Services. But Play Services is a Google blob, phoning home and the works. The higher-level stuff is what "matters" to people. If Play Services were open source, then someone could release forks of that which patch out the questionable parts of it (just like Chromium/Chrome, in reverse). Efforts could be combined on the open source parts of things, so that we don't spend our lives rewriting battery-efficient geofencing services. the gain from running on Android is that you can concentrate on higher-level value-adds first, to build adoption of your stack. You could build out some cross-platform thing too, it's just that Android tends to make things a bit easier for swapping things out. Sailfish sounds like a good option for this, but what I'm reading is that the people making Librem are spending a lot of effort building out a new OS mostly from Linux?
    - s17n 9y ago
      Play services exists to give Google a way to deliver updates that isn't subject to carrier or oem interference. If it was open sourced, that would defeat the purpose. To put it another way, giving the general public access to the source wouldn't make any difference to Google, but giving Samsung that access would make a big difference.
  - 9y ago
- morganvachon 9y ago
  My problem isn't that they couldn't pull off a fully open laptop, it's that they lied and said they would, knowing from the start they were dealing with chips that were impossible to open source. Then, they doubled down and lied again. If I contribute to a campaign that says they will give me something, and they fail to come through not once but twice, I expect my money back. They are scam artists as far as I'm concerned. If one guy[1] can pull off a truly, fully open hardware and software laptop, you'd think a fully funded startup could do better. It's embarrassing. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
  - ploxiln 9y ago
    They're not malicious, they're just not smart about software (even if their heart is in the right place). I ordered the Librem 13 as soon as the crowdfunding for it started. I received it about 10 months later I think. It's real, it works. But yes, all the software parts they were really supposed to focus on and get right, were a joke. In one of their first updates, they talked about working on touchpad driver, and releasing it as GPLv3. I emailed them saying they probably had a typo, the linux kernel is GPLv2 only of course ... nope, they just didn't know what they were doing, they were like "hmm we'll ask the FSF about that". How could you not already know this if you are working professionally on this. Their touchpad driver was not finished and integrated upstream until over a year later. This is the easiest software part they had to do any work on. During that time, they didn't have good instructions for installing it as a separate module for an arbitrary kernel - some guy from another org set up a github repo with that. And after everything, they couldn't get the touchpad model detection working well enough (it looks like a plain ps/2 mouse to the system) so it doesn't even work by default with an upstream kernel, you have to echo "byd" into a sysfs file to tell the system it's this crappy model of touchpad, and then it mostly works, as a plain mouse (no two-finger scroll, just edge scroll, and no touchpad config/adjustment). EDIT: by the way, their latest laptop models use a different touchpad with a good driver (which they didn't have to do any work on) Up next, "PureOS", their debian based distro. I don't really care, but I was trying to use it for a bit so I could easily use their kernel with their touchpad driver while it wasn't upstream yet. My laptop came configured with nothing in the apt sources.list, it got no security updates. I had to figure out how to put debian stretch sources in there on my own. I later figured out how to add a source which had their custom packages (kernel, and useless old firefox variant). This wasn't written anywhere on their website! And it stopped working and moved to different URLs! I don't think their PureOS had proper stable apt sources for updates and general package installing, for 6 months after users started getting their laptops, which was long after their crowdfunding got going. I guess their "debian developer" can maintain a couple of packages for debian, but setting up some standard repo mirrors for their OS took about a full year longer than it should have. (I still wouldn't bother with their distro. They should have just installed plain debian stretch and avoided all this stuff they suck at.) And finally, the firmware and ME. All the updates for the first 6 or 9 months talked about the progress on coreboot, and then that was paused for experiments on neutralizing the ME. But there was nothing to show for it until January THIS YEAR when they hired a new guy to pick up the work on it again. One and half years with empty hands, two years before delivering on the original coreboot promise. It turns out this new guy is smart and gets stuff done. Coreboot is ported, ME is neutralized. But it seems that everyone else Todd Weaver hired before that was not really capable. Or maybe their efforts were terribly mismanaged. Both are believable - Todd is a hardware/manufacturing guy, he doesn't really know software much. This laptop isn't too bad, I'm not bitter about it. Just disappointed and frustrated about the missed potential. I really don't think Purism did anything malicious - they're just kinda dumb and unaware and simplistic. I agree, free/libre software on modern devices is important. But you have to have more than the ideal which you read about in some essay on the internet, you have to also know a thing or two about software, and they just don't. They're total newbies playing a rather difficult game.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

ZenoArrow 9y ago

Let's put it like this... many laptops can run a FLOSS operating system, but how many smartphones can you say the same about? There's only a handful I can think of, and most of those are no longer produced. Even if not every binary blob is removed, the opportunity to kickstart a FLOSS-based phone ecosystem is not one that comes along that often.

rtpg 9y ago
Android is Apache licensed. There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source. A lot of people enjoy replacing the lowest level of the system with OSS. But consumers only notice that afterwards they have nothing on the highest level. I think the Raspberry Pi took the right approach here accepting the binary blob GPU but having the software stack otherwise be free. They got adoption because things were useful! And now they "just" have to solve the GPU problem, instead of a "rewrite all software " problem. I would be very excited by people who could offer a "skin " over Android (with its own set of apps) so the higher level stuff could be tackled. Once that part of the stack is nice, swapping out the backend will be an even easier pitch. The counterpoints I can think of: - If you do not trust the backend, hard to have proper security. - People are doing what they want to do! Lots of people like writing kernel-y code more than a dialer UI
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source." Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where Play Services were open source. How would this hold back Google from maintaining/growing their market share? As for developing for Android and swapping out the backend later, by that point your apps would be tied into the Android API calls, unless you intentionally make your apps cross-platform, at which point what do you gain from running Android? If it's just for the drivers then libhybris is an option. If you want the ability to run Android apps whilst you build up your own, this is something you can do with Sailfish OS, which you'll almost certainly be able to run on the Librem smartphone if it's released.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    My point about Play Services was that, despite Android being OSS, it is not sufficient to just set up AOSP. People still want to use apps, so you have to get a copy of Play Services. But Play Services is a Google blob, phoning home and the works. The higher-level stuff is what "matters" to people. If Play Services were open source, then someone could release forks of that which patch out the questionable parts of it (just like Chromium/Chrome, in reverse). Efforts could be combined on the open source parts of things, so that we don't spend our lives rewriting battery-efficient geofencing services. the gain from running on Android is that you can concentrate on higher-level value-adds first, to build adoption of your stack. You could build out some cross-platform thing too, it's just that Android tends to make things a bit easier for swapping things out. Sailfish sounds like a good option for this, but what I'm reading is that the people making Librem are spending a lot of effort building out a new OS mostly from Linux?
  - s17n 9y ago
    Play services exists to give Google a way to deliver updates that isn't subject to carrier or oem interference. If it was open sourced, that would defeat the purpose. To put it another way, giving the general public access to the source wouldn't make any difference to Google, but giving Samsung that access would make a big difference.
- 9y ago
morganvachon 9y ago
My problem isn't that they couldn't pull off a fully open laptop, it's that they lied and said they would, knowing from the start they were dealing with chips that were impossible to open source. Then, they doubled down and lied again. If I contribute to a campaign that says they will give me something, and they fail to come through not once but twice, I expect my money back. They are scam artists as far as I'm concerned. If one guy[1] can pull off a truly, fully open hardware and software laptop, you'd think a fully funded startup could do better. It's embarrassing. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
- ploxiln 9y ago
  They're not malicious, they're just not smart about software (even if their heart is in the right place). I ordered the Librem 13 as soon as the crowdfunding for it started. I received it about 10 months later I think. It's real, it works. But yes, all the software parts they were really supposed to focus on and get right, were a joke. In one of their first updates, they talked about working on touchpad driver, and releasing it as GPLv3. I emailed them saying they probably had a typo, the linux kernel is GPLv2 only of course ... nope, they just didn't know what they were doing, they were like "hmm we'll ask the FSF about that". How could you not already know this if you are working professionally on this. Their touchpad driver was not finished and integrated upstream until over a year later. This is the easiest software part they had to do any work on. During that time, they didn't have good instructions for installing it as a separate module for an arbitrary kernel - some guy from another org set up a github repo with that. And after everything, they couldn't get the touchpad model detection working well enough (it looks like a plain ps/2 mouse to the system) so it doesn't even work by default with an upstream kernel, you have to echo "byd" into a sysfs file to tell the system it's this crappy model of touchpad, and then it mostly works, as a plain mouse (no two-finger scroll, just edge scroll, and no touchpad config/adjustment). EDIT: by the way, their latest laptop models use a different touchpad with a good driver (which they didn't have to do any work on) Up next, "PureOS", their debian based distro. I don't really care, but I was trying to use it for a bit so I could easily use their kernel with their touchpad driver while it wasn't upstream yet. My laptop came configured with nothing in the apt sources.list, it got no security updates. I had to figure out how to put debian stretch sources in there on my own. I later figured out how to add a source which had their custom packages (kernel, and useless old firefox variant). This wasn't written anywhere on their website! And it stopped working and moved to different URLs! I don't think their PureOS had proper stable apt sources for updates and general package installing, for 6 months after users started getting their laptops, which was long after their crowdfunding got going. I guess their "debian developer" can maintain a couple of packages for debian, but setting up some standard repo mirrors for their OS took about a full year longer than it should have. (I still wouldn't bother with their distro. They should have just installed plain debian stretch and avoided all this stuff they suck at.) And finally, the firmware and ME. All the updates for the first 6 or 9 months talked about the progress on coreboot, and then that was paused for experiments on neutralizing the ME. But there was nothing to show for it until January THIS YEAR when they hired a new guy to pick up the work on it again. One and half years with empty hands, two years before delivering on the original coreboot promise. It turns out this new guy is smart and gets stuff done. Coreboot is ported, ME is neutralized. But it seems that everyone else Todd Weaver hired before that was not really capable. Or maybe their efforts were terribly mismanaged. Both are believable - Todd is a hardware/manufacturing guy, he doesn't really know software much. This laptop isn't too bad, I'm not bitter about it. Just disappointed and frustrated about the missed potential. I really don't think Purism did anything malicious - they're just kinda dumb and unaware and simplistic. I agree, free/libre software on modern devices is important. But you have to have more than the ideal which you read about in some essay on the internet, you have to also know a thing or two about software, and they just don't. They're total newbies playing a rather difficult game.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]