Librem 5 phone / Purism (from a Freedom standpoint)

[TRS-80]

I split this off to it's own topic, as it became more about Librem 5 which was offtopic from the original discussion.

 

3 hours ago, Igor said:

But we know this won't happen  Well supported Android is also opensource on the level those guys operate 

 

Being someone aware of Libreboot for some years now, I was never a fan of Purism and the BS they pulled with their laptops, which meant either:

• they knew fully libre firmware was not possible, and lied (or)
• they really wanted to do as stated, but ran face first into a wall due to lack of knowledge / research beforehand (about Intel IME issues)

And so, back then I never really paid much attention to them, thinking (like you do) that they were just another company "cashing in" as you say, and everything from them is all marketing BS.

 

But for some reason I started reading up on the Librem 5 phone, which was/is purported to be the first phone that will run actual full on GNU/Linux (not bastardized toy version like Android). But like you I am well aware of firmware / baseband radio issues as I have educated myself about that over at Replicant OS (and elsewhere) over a period of years...

 

Anyway at some point more recently I stumbled across a talk the Purism CTO gave at CCCamp 2019 where she elaborated on these challenges in a 45-minute presentation: “A Mobile Phone that Respects Your Freedom.”

 

I found it to be a good discussion of (rough outline): cell phone market in general -> chip market in particular -> patent cancer (~250,000 to implement anything 4G) and how this is used to control the market in practice -> engineering decisions -> supply chain (Qualcomm, etc. do not want to sell separate modems, but rather integrated SoC which are of course problem from Freedom standpoint, even 10k units not enough) -> compromises they had to make within current realities.

 

Now, certainly this is not 100% full libre firmware that we would all like to see, but this is why I stated very carefully in the other thread "I think is just about the current state of the art as regards Freedom." As outlined in above video I think this is the best possible within current realities, and I for one am glad that they are pushing the envelope with an explicit goal of Freedom. And to that end, so far this is what they have accomplished / how they are going about it:

• Hardware
  • using NXP iMX8M Quad
    • only libre GPU drivers available at the time (2017)
  • radios on separate M.2 cards
    • upgradeable
    • isolate blobs from main CPU
• Software
  • everything they do GPL v3
  • "upstream first"
  • regular uBoot
    • DDR4 init blob in separate SPI flash
  • OS based on Debian (PureOS)
  • desktop following freedesktop.org standards

Now one is certainly free to criticize them, and form one's own opinion, but in my view they have clearly done quite a lot to bring the current "state of the art" forward by leaps and bounds, especially in terms of Freedom. Seeing as how they seem to be the only company actually pushing forward on this front at all, I do plan on buying one of their devices at some point to support them financially.

 

Having said all that, I still did not become a backer, due to their past BS and the way their CEO/Founder Todd Weaver seems to like to play fast and loose with details and the truth. So I am by no means "drinking the kool-aid." But, if they succeed, even partially, they will have moved things forward by quite a lot. And so in the end all will be forgiven. After some delays, it is my understanding that now the first units are actually finally shipping.

 

I think this is the best thing we can hope for presently, and I hope they succeed. Eventually, in time, maybe we can unravel the mess that is software patents. But that is going to be a long term battle on lots of fronts (political, legal, etc.) over a period of years and decades. As I mentioned in another thread, that does not mean I think we should "throw the baby out with the bath water." IMO it is more about continuing to push in a direction, and realizing incremental changes as much as we can, until all the little rain drops increase into a deluge that the dinosaur business models can no longer ignore (which has already happened in several other market segments)...

Edited February 3, 2020 by TRS-80
clarification on patents being used to control market, grammar