Libreboot – A free BIOS or UEFI replacement
libreboot.org
libreboot.org
https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/index.html#supported_laptops_...
Nothing recent but on the plus side, you should be able to pick one up without spending too much.
Picture: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/libreboot-on-my-x60s/
Oh, and, the free in libreBoot is just cosmetics, so I shrug, whatever.
I'm curious, what do you propose instead?
Obviously, this requires specialized hardware, but it's not completely insurmountable if you're really determined to run the thing.
https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-t400/
Their laptops are cheap and with good configuration except for CPU and graphics card. I will have hard time running Matlab on such a machine, so I cannot make that investment. Better CPU please especially when your laptop is 2.2 kg in weight.
> Intel is only going to get worse when it comes to user freedom. Libreboot has no support recent Intel platforms, precisely because of the problems described above. The only way to solve this is to get Intel to change their policies and to be more friendly to the free software community. Reverse engineering won't solve anything long-term, unfortunately, but we need to keep doing it anyway. Moving forward, Intel hardware is a non-option unless a radical change happens within Intel.
> Basically, all Intel hardware from year 2010 and beyond will never be supported by libreboot. The libreboot project is actively ignoring all modern Intel hardware at this point, and focusing on alternative platforms.
Leah is extremely unresponsive, when I ordered mine it took over 2 months for it to be shipped with no prior indication of this (it should've taken at most 3 weeks to arrive at my home), and any email response from Minifree took at least 3 weeks.
Oh, and Leah billed me UK taxes instead of Dutch taxes as per the EU webshop rules, so that was a lot of fun when I had to file my taxes.
The shittiest customer experience I've had in years.
Your description of the experience only nodded in the same direction.
That's different for most services, e.g. if you ship a laptop to Minifree and they just flash it and send it back, they have to bill the taxes of your country. If they do any of it differently, they're doing a mistake.
There are other companies that can provide you with Libreboot, blob-free coreboot or other libre boot solutions on your Thinkpad if you're unhappy with their service (according to your experience that seems to be an appropriate response).
Minifree doesn't stand for the quality standard for the whole "libre community" as Albert Heijn (a supermarket chain) doesn't set the gold standards for the whole supermarket industry.
I won't have the time to set this up myself soon, so I went ahead and bought one. It's my rainy day laptop.
Making some performance concessions and receiving something wholly libre in return is fine for the target audience.
I've been of the opinion for many years that GNU is delivering something more like "freedom for people who are in our situation." There's the counterintuitive effect where moving things from hardware to firmware, i.e., enabling (at least in theory) the end user to change how their computing works, makes a system less "free" in the GNU definition, because the standard for measurement is how computers used to be. There's the fact that GNU has never prioritized the web platform (possibly because Stallman doesn't use a web browser, and instead emails URLs to a server that replies with a lynx -dump of the page, reading the response when he checks email the next day), and so, one, there's very little support for a freedom-respecting web browser, and two, there is basically no attempt at solving the JavaScript trap, on the grounds that not running JS is better. There's the complete lack of an ethos on cloud computing other than "Don't," despite the fact that GNU comes out of the university environment where all your computing was controlled by someone else, namely the university sysadmins.
So, ultimately, there's a long history of the GNU folks not anticipating ways in which people have their computing freedoms infringed and basically going "Well you're doing something wrong, stop doing that." It's sadly quite unsurprising that the same ideology means that when an employee is harassed in a way that the executives haven't personally experienced, they assume that the employee must be doing something wrong.
There is no proof has been disclosed indicating the person fired was for receiving too much harrassment and with the responses of the rest of libreboot devs I don't think such a thing happened at all.
>There's the fact that GNU has never prioritized the web platform (possibly because Stallman doesn't use a web browser, and instead emails URLs to a server that replies with a lynx -dump of the page, reading the response when he checks email the next day), and so, one, there's very little support for a freedom-respecting web browser,
Besides https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/ ?
> and two, there is basically no attempt at solving the JavaScript trap, on the grounds that not running JS is better. There's the complete lack of an ethos on cloud computing other than "Don't," despite the fact that GNU comes out of the university environment where all your computing was controlled by someone else, namely the university sysadmins.
Are you sure https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/ doesn't solve your needs?
RMS agrees with you! From his Reddit AMA a while back [1].
All in all, I think it is a mistake to defend people's rights with one hand tied behind our backs, using nothing except the individual option to say no to a deal. We should use democracy to organize and together impose limits on what the rich can do to the rest of us. That's what democracy was invented for!
> very little support for a freedom-respecting web browser
I mean 15-20% market share for Firefox doesn't really sound like much but it's much better than the 2% that Linux has.
> possibly because Stallman doesn't use a web browser
Not that it really matters in this discussion but that's not really true anymore. He supposedly uses Firefox with Tor.
> not running JS is better
He's not exactly wrong. Just from a security perspective alone, would you feel comfortable running random binaries downloaded from the internet? You're putting a lot of faith in your browser's sandbox. Outside of F/OSS libraries most JS on the web is proprietary. The LibreJS [2] project is something that's supposed to counteract this (and I support it on my site) but it's beyond niche even in tech circles.
Was the transgender employee fired because she was transgender, or was she fired for some other reason? It is really hard to tell unless there is a court case on it.
If you remember Ellen Pao claimed she was fired because of her gender, and it went to court, and the only proof that they had for anything was that Pao was bullying others and being a bad employee with performance issues.
Transgender people need to be treated with respect and dignity, but if they don't perform well they will get fired like anyone else.
I don't like the drama either, but it happens from time to time.
I think it is some sort of politics, like trying to attack Linus because he rejected some SJW's contributions to the Linux Kernel because it caused a Kernel panic and asked if she bothered to test the code before submitting it. Then he is accused of being sexist towards her because he used cuss words.
[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-09/msg0003...
Make from that what you will.
There are many reasons that someone could change their mind and decide to take different actions than they have before. Either way it is clear that some form of 'bad blood' has arisen and that things are now divisive. Unfortunately I don't know who I can side with on this issue due to the lack of data.
At the very least, I think we can conclude that the FSF and the fired employee are unhappy with Leah's actions.
On the other hand, the problem with claiming "I'm being biased against!" is of course twofold: One, any noncisgendered-white-male employee can claim it even if the main problem was a lack of productivity. Two, when I feel unwelcome, my optimal response is to just leave instead of suing those I feel unwelcome from (with the added assumption that it is very hard to change people's preferences for other people, and that there's a certain amount of "dealing with the way things are right now instead of forcing them to be otherwise" acceptance available.)
Nobody likes drama queens, not employers and not employees. Just go, I say, and find a welcoming environment. You're not married to a software project.
I don't get why it is in any way remarkable.