The Almost Completely Open Source Laptop Goes on Sale
Is this fsf free hardware?
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/novena/
Is it eligible to get the FSF's RYF certification? In order to give it their stamp of approval in the form of that Respects Your Freedom logo, the software for the graphics hardware needs to be worked out. They raised money for as a stretch goal in the crowdfunding campaign. Once (if?) the graphics hardware is worked out to make it sufficient... then the question becomes the distro it ships with. Probably Debian GNU/Linux. In addition to the graphics they'd need to swap out the distro for an FSF-approved one. None of them currently support ARM though. This is the same issue that prevented the Lemote Yeeloong from being able to get the FSF's RYF certification because Lemote didn't ship it with, say, gNewSense and the FSF can give it their stamp of approval if they can't give the software that ships with it their stamp of approval. Hopefully at least one of the FSF-endorsed distrosw ill add support for this CPU architecture.
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On 22.11.2014 04:46, name at domain wrote:
> Probably Debian GNU/Linux.
Confirmed:
"All configurations will come with Debian (GNU/Linux) pre-installed"
https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop
> In addition to the graphics they'd need to
> swap out the distro for an FSF-approved one. None of them currently
> support ARM though.
The most recent discussion on this topic I could find is this:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-dev/2014-04/msg00031.html
However, I couldn't find any follow up from the original poster to
Michał's question:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-dev/2014-04/msg00032.html
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I really don't believe porting an FSF-endorsed distro to an ARM board
would be hard. The two main problems are: lack of appropriate boards
(no FSF-endorseable ones, the developers are not interested in porting
to something less free; I think also some high-performance ones are
needed for native builds) and lack of sufficiently interested developers
(due to the boards issue?). I remember statements from developers of
gNewSense and Trisquel that hardware is the main issue.
If these issues are solved, then porting gNewSense, Trisquel or Parabola
would probably require just enabling upstream armhf repo (or, in case of
Parabola, merging changes/packages from the upstream derivative with
ARMv7 support), deblobbing a kernel branch, building all modified
packages and maybe fixing portability issues in added code.
How could it be that, if it ships with Debian, it does'nt respect user's freedom ?, If the user really wants freedom, then he or she won't enable the non-free repo. It's as simple as that.
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On 22.11.2014 12:00, name at domain wrote:
> How could it be that, if it ships with Debian, it does'nt respect user's
> freedom ?, If the user really wants freedom, then he or she won't enable
> the non-free repo. It's as simple as that.
3d acceleration is an important feature and if you can't have this with
free software on this laptop, then it means that this laptop doesn't
respect your freedom™. Nothing simpler.
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On 22.11.2014 12:08, Tiberiu C. Turbureanu wrote:
> On 22.11.2014 12:00, name at domain wrote:
>> How could it be that, if it ships with Debian, it does'nt respect user's
>> freedom ?, If the user really wants freedom, then he or she won't enable
>> the non-free repo. It's as simple as that.
>
> 3d acceleration is an important feature and if you can't have this with
> free software on this laptop, then it means that this laptop doesn't
> respect your freedom™. Nothing simpler.
And because of this, I am sure they will ship Novena preinstalled with
Debian with the non-free repository enabled.
As FreedomBox does too for the wifi AFAIK (which is ironical,
considering the name of the project and its script called freedom-maker).
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freedombox/freedom-maker/master/bin/freedombox-customize
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On 22.11.2014 03:44, name at domain wrote:
> Is this fsf free hardware?
> http://www.wired.com/2014/04/novena/
Short answer: NO.
Long answer:
Free hardware design devices != free software (or FSF-certified
freedom-respecting) device
The wifi internal card is (as of now) ath9k and freedom-respecting, no
nonfree firmware required:
"Ships with pre-installed: Ath9k (blob-free firmware) mPCIe wifi card,
802.11n b/g 1T1R"
https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop
However, this laptop can't get the RYF certification until solves the
video card freedom issues:
"Major firmware risk areas are:
- graphics: there are no Free Software drivers for the 3D core
- video: there are no Free Software drivers for the hardware video
accelerator DSP"
https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop
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On 22.11.2014 10:33, Tiberiu C. Turbureanu wrote:
> Free hardware design devices != free software (or FSF-certified
> freedom-respecting) device
Also, "completely open source" is of course a big overstatement as
usually when people say something is "open source". To have a completely
free hardware design, this laptop should have free hardware designs for
all its components, not just for the main board. I doubt the internal
video card, wifi card, etc have free hardware designs. Those are
mainstream proprietary design hardware.
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I hope they'll work out the video card issue and when it comes to the ryf certificate, who cares as long as it doesn't require nonfree software.