On 03/08/2018 08:26 AM, ghostlands wrote:

> The important thing about Purism is that it's the only effort leaning in this direction to make it this far financially and as an entity.
No it isn't - bunnylabs and raptor engineering are making brand new
shipping libre products.
The T2 is somewhat of a rarity in that for once there is a new current
tech libre firmware motherboard with performance and features just as
good as any new proprietary system.

Do the ends justify the means? Is purism's false and dishonest
advertising worth it in exchange for a vague goal of free hardware some
day in the future?
The community and myself wouldn't have had an issue with them if their
marketing was honest, but it isn't.
> The (ironically) purists started out pure and strict and refused to deviate for (decades?) and now in their pristine future what they have to show for it is extremely geriatric, expensive, heavy, bulky, butt-ugly plastic laptops that almost no one will ever want to buy.
The goal is to have a laptop that respects your privacy not one that
appeals to the shiny apple loving masses.
Besides the novena there are a few nice circa 2013 AMD laptops that have
an IOMMU, it is not as if the old and slow thinkpads are the only option.

Purism appears to be re-branding whitebox laptops which costs
significantly less than producing new hardware, as far as I am aware you
can't do a custom motherboard fab for the volume and amount of money
they are dealing with.

Without absurd amounts of money it is simply impossible to have libre
hardware that keeps up with the latest mass market trends with a new
model every year.
> Their business model is absurd, and they will never command the public's wallets, which you absolutely need to do when your business involves physical objects. Their prices will never come down when they can't sell in quantity, and they'll never sell in quantity because the general public does not want the laptop they're selling, and neither does industry.
>
> We in the free software world contribute development for free all the time, but most developers I know do their free work on the side. They get paid through some corporate or proprietary business like most people. Some work is too intensive to do on the side (for free), and still make progress in a reasonable amount of time. Hence the 7-year turnaround coreboot devs cite, and I imagine some of the coreboot team does work on the project full time.
>
> What I'm getting at is, as a profitable entity they will be positioned to *actually pay people* to do some of this firmware work, and eventually, who knows, may even be able to develop chips themselves. So long as Purism continues to demonstrate progress chipping away at the Libre goal, let's throw some money at them, or at least support. We can revolt and pull it whenever we want anyway.
What progress have they made? Their laptops hardware initiation is still
performed by binary blobs years later and they haven't actually disabled ME.

If they were able to not include the ME kernel and have the system still
function (aka disabled ME) I would give them some credit but that isn't
the case and they are simply profiting off the work of real security
researchers.
Being able to physically disconnect ME and have the system still
function is where is is truly removed and gone as in that case you don't
have to worry about a Mask ROM.

Please note that the issue is with their dishonest marketing not their
existence in general.