Really cool modular and freedom-respecting computer

[sulu]

@onpon4:
Since I agree with WizardStan in all points I will spare you a lengthy answer.
I'm not saying, you shouldn't buy the product. I'm just saying, if you care for FLOSS you should be aware that it contains components that were created by violating the very essence of what FLOSS is about. And a RYF certificate would harm that awareness imo.

 

[comradekingu]

What you fail to notice is that Allwinner couldnt avoid voilating the GPL to make their product, that is the strength of free software.
For whatever route they took to get to this point, it matters what they are doing _now_.
Can they avoid conforming to the requirements now, well then i suppose i can avoid buying anything from them.

The A20 is not all that new, and you could even argue that with interest for it, allwinner sees a market.
Its not like we are spoilt for choice in the you have a choice-department.

Edit: And if you don't like allwinner, you can buy just the cabinet, like some people have done already.
The standard is meant to be open.

 

[sulu]

What you fail to notice is that Allwinner couldnt avoid voilating the GPL to make their product, that is the strength of free software.

Not violating the GPL would have been very easy:
Either release the corresponding software under the terms of the GPL, or, if other obligations prevent you from doing that, don't release anything at all.

It's not like someone forces them to do business.

 

[diligentcircle]

I'm advocating not pretending like Walmart isn't surviving because of the aforementioned sweatshops.

Nobody is pretending anything. Nowhere on the CrowdSupply page or anywhere else is it ever stated that Allwinner is a good company. Perhaps you don't understand this: there isn't any company producing low-level computer hardware that is good. All of these companies are very large and do bad things. Short of not using computers at all, we can't avoid buying parts from these evil corporations. That's just the reality of today.

just don't act like they're 100% free of sin.

"Sin" is a religious concept, and being a non-religious person, I reject it. It is also never mentioned anywhere in the CrowdSupply page.

if someone is an assassin, murders people for money, and then donates that money to charities, it is a good thing that money is going to help people but there should be no false pretenses about where that money came from: if you accept the money for charity you need be ok with the fact that people literally died in order for it to be donated.

No, you don't. This isn't even an appropriate comparison, but charities can't run properly if they check where all the money they get comes from and refuse donations based on this. The FSF accepts $50,000 in donations from Google, one of the largest, most evil corporations in the world today, but this isn't a problem as long as they aren't dependent on it (they aren't).

if you accept this device as RYF then you need to be OK with the fact that AllWinner is only in a position to offer it today because they violated the GPL.

First off, no, you don't. I don't even see how their GPL violations are related with being able to produce an SoC. GPL violations certainly have absolutely nothing to do with that SoC being capable of enabling RYF certification; that's all circumstantial or due to reverse-engineering or clever use of the SoC.

Second off, even if GPL violations somehow are responsible for Allwinner being able to make an SoC that we can use, it's already made and available. And it can respect our freedom. I feel like I'm repeating myself, but we don't exactly have a lot of options. Every modern x86 system (post-2010 for Intel, post-2013 for AMD) has a mandatory backdoor which can literally be used to see everything on your system. That Intel and AMD are doing this is far worse than GPL violations, and it actually directly affects us as users. In that sense, modern x86 CPUs are actually tainted: they are designed in such a way that they can never be freedom-respecting or trusted. Despite this, many of us use modern Intel CPUs, because we don't have a whole lot of options (the best option we have is a rather old refurbished laptop, and that is quite expensive).

That's the most substantial thing about EOMA68: this project, if it is successful, can change all of that. It can give us those options we so severely lack. But we can't make this project successful with ideological purism. As always, some pragmatic decisions need to be made, and that means not rejecting a (comparatively) perfectly good SoC because of unrelated bad activities by its manufacturer.

 

[Neelix]

Except that the whole point of the RYF certification is to promote The FSF's ideological purism. If it were actually about freedom it would be a lot less restrictive.

-Neelix

 

[diligentcircle]

No, RYF is to promote devices that buyers can trust (i.e. they don't require proprietary software for any advertised function and won't cause anyone to accidentally run proprietary software). Ideological purity has nothing to do with that. Think Penguin, which has received two RYF certifications for very important hardware, is not ideologically pure; they sell computers with modern x86 CPUs from Intel (i.e. dependent on proprietary software and with a proprietary BIOS), and they bundle those computers with Ubuntu by default unless you go to libre.thinkpenguin.com. Also, both RYF-certified laptops are originally from IBM, a company guilty of including digital restrictions in its laptops which prevent you from installing unapproved wireless cards. All of these products have been celebrated because it's not about ideological purity. It's about products.

 

[Neelix]

Sure... That's how the FSF presents it but the devil is in the details. The details of the certification make it impractical for any company which isn't itself specifically focused on maintaining the FSF's ideals to apply it to their products.

In any case what the RYF certification is about isn't really relevant to the point. The thing is that the only people to whom the RYF certification would have any relevance at all are those who care about the FSF's ideological position. To then argue that those same people shouldn't or wouldn't care about GPL violations by a company so intimately involved in such an important aspect of the device's construction - violations which may well be present in the default OS of the devices themselves if they use a kernel based on Allwinner's kernel - seems both bizarre and hypocritical.

-Neelix

 

[diligentcircle]

We don't apply this to the ThinkPad laptops which were manufactured by IBM. Who is guilty of putting DRM in their laptops. And those laptops actually have IBM branding plainly visible on them; the user doesn't see the Allwinner branding on the Libre Tea computer card.

We don't reject Linux because its developer completely disagrees with our views and has promoted proprietary software in the past (Linux used to be hosted on a proprietary revision control system. You could say it wouldn't have made it as far as it did without that.)

We don't reject POSIX because its original implementation (UNIX) was proprietary, and we don't reject GNU because it was literally built on such a proprietary implementation.

Why are you insisting that we should act like single-minded ideologues? We have never done this. We cannot do this. I don't want us to do this. We do, always have, and always should make pragmatic decisions. That means, when we have limited options, we take what we can get, rather than insisting on boycotting companies because they also do some unrelated bad activities. And if a company is simultaneously responsible for good products and bad products, we take the good products and reject the bad products.

As for the FUD about "maybe it has the GPL violations in it", that was addressed here:

 

[Neelix]

And again, no-one was suggesting boycotting anything. The only thing that anyone here has suggested is to provide all potential buyers who would be basing part of that purchase decision on the RYF certification with information that would probably be relevant to the philosophical aspect of their decision making process. If they choose to be pragmatic about it more power to them.

-Neelix

 

[rygD]

We don't reject Linux

I do.

We do, always have, and always should make pragmatic decisions.

That doesn't sound like the FSF I know.

 

[diligentcircle]

That doesn't sound like the FSF I know.

The entire point of copyleft is pragmatism.

The only thing that anyone here has suggested is to provide all potential buyers who would be basing part of that purchase decision on the RYF certification with information that would probably be relevant to the philosophical aspect of their decision making process.

The fact that it's an Allwinner SoC is disclosed. Using an Allwinner SoC doesn't make it your job to tell potential buyers about all the evil things Allwinner does. There is no mention by either of the people distributing RYF-certified ThinkPad laptops about IBM's DRM in newer laptops, and it would be unreasonable to demand that they add such an irrelevant mention. How about the fact that Qualcomm Atheros's newer wireless hardware requires proprietary firmware to work? Think Penguin doesn't say, "By the way, Qualcomm Atheros is actually an evil company, so keep that in mind when buying this hardware from Qualcomm Atheros which respects your freedom." That would be absurd.

 

[rygD]

The entire point of copyleft is pragmatism.

Um, no it isn't...perhaps that is what the FSF and friends preach, though.

 

[Neelix]

Except that we aren't talking about unrelated misconduct specific to other products by the same company. The GPL violations are in the software that's meant to drive the hardware being built into the very core of the products in question. That makes it relevant.

-Neelix

 

[rygD]

As I understand it, that won't be the case here.

 

[WizardStan]

Nobody is pretending anything

You did. It was pointed out that because of the GPL violations, everything that is produced by AllWinner is technically tainted. You said that was "silly". I counter by saying it isn't silly, that is exactly what it is: everything produced by AllWinner only exists because they violated the GPL, ergo, everything they produce is tainted.

No, you don't. This isn't even an appropriate comparison, but charities can't run properly if they check where all the money they get comes from and refuse donations based on this.

Ok, I literally said it was an extreme example, and as such it was obviously implied that you needed to accept a little leeway to make it fit. At a sufficiently high level they are effectively the same: both the charity and the company survive only because they acquired funds through dubious means.
If you, as a charity, are aware that the money being donated is from an assassin, but recognize that without it you would not survive, then you need to make peace with the fact that people are dying so that your charity can help others. Refuse the donation and it fails, and many people you would have helped lose.
So to, if you are working for a company and design a device that fits the RYF requirement, but the R&D money came from sales made through violation of the GPL, then you need to make peace with the fact that your "free" device only exists because of past transgressions against that same "freedom".

"Sin" is a religious concept, and being a non-religious person, I reject it.

Oh get off it, you know exactly what I meant. The "sin" is the violation of the GPL. I used the term because it's supposed to be universally understood as some crime against a higher power, that power in this case simply being the FOSS movement

First off, no, you don't. I don't even see how their GPL violations are related with being able to produce an SoC.

They made money on GPL violations. They only exist today because of GPL violations. They can only continue to operate because in the past they violated the GPL. I don't see why this is a difficult concept for you to grasp, I feel I've laid it out very deliberately.

I feel like I'm repeating myself, but we don't exactly have a lot of options.

That is 100% irrelevant. They violated the GPL, their money is tainted. Whether there are options or not does not change that fact. This isn't a debate about morals, it is a fact: they made money off violating the GPL, have not made any strides at reparations, so everything they do is necessarily tainted with that money. This says absolutely nothing about whether you should or should not support them in this device and their push for RYF.
[doublepost=1467385030,1467384943][/doublepost]

We don't apply this to the ThinkPad laptops which were manufactured by IBM.

The ThinkPad doesn't have RYF certification, it isn't being sold as a device that "supports freedom" on the backs of company that made money actively denying that same freedom.

 

[Klumpen]

Why does every thread that mentions FSF or RYF early on escalate so quickly?

 

[rygD]

Because it's fun.

 

[pyrat]

snif.

I agree a little with everybody. In fact I dislike Allwinner, I don't know much wrong about Texas Instruments (but dislike PowerVR by Imagination Technologies) but at the end of it, ARM itself is hostile to free software,
and Intel and AMD are already selling backdoor-only hardware, and so on. Aparently you're left with some MIPS and Power 8 (if you can trust IBM) and maybe Arduinos, Myquists, etc. .

Buying from vendors that alienate users is collaborationism (no Godwin intended, afaik the word began with Napoleon, not the nazis). In fact reverse engineering and adding free software support for those
vendor products is adding value to those vendors offerings, so it's collaborationism too, if you want to be strict. Learnign to use proprietary software also adds value to the software, so it is collaborationism too.

In fact the more I think about it, the only conclusion I can reach is that the best option is not using computers. But that will hardly help getting "just computing" to the world. And "just computing" is useful. And humanity is not so well off that it can ignore useful resources. History proved humans can live without electronic computers, what is unproven is that computing needs to be evil. Can "just computing" be achieved ? If it can, can it exist at the same time than evil computing or only after evil computing is erradicated? The answers are hard and mostly a leap of faith in humans.

In fact there is a deeper problem that you could name with the oximoron "immaterial sustainability". Not only proprietary software is leading to obsolescence and therefore extra waste and resource depletion. The fact that hardware and computers on sale change so fast and there's so much diversity makes it very hard to build collective knowledge that is sufficient to manage that software and hardware corpus. It's not only that we don't have time to reverse engineer and free devices. It's that we don't have time to audit all free software, don't have time to keep the internet safe, don't have time to (learn and) spread the good practices and the understanding throughout society so that the use of computers, networks and services is concious.

So innovation is not clearly positive. It can bring new positive features, but it can also bring antifeatures, and it sure brings a requirement to judge whether the new features are positive or not. The more open the innovation is the less hard it is to judge and the more likely it is that positive features outweight the work of judging it and maintaining it up to date and the more likely it is to detect antifeatures or unintended problems.

So in a way the only ethical thing to do is pull the brakes (I mean to slow down, in fact car brake pedals are pushed, not pulled... and bicyle brake handles are... mmmm... what vehicle brakes must I have been thinking of? an old train? a horse car?). Not too unlike "ungrowth" (is that English?, "decroissance" like by Latouche). We should buy the fewest products as possible, not to feed evil vendors, and if we deem it necessary to buy one, we should try to buy it second hand so that the money does not go to the vendor (it stil increases the vendor product's value, but in a way that it is competing with its older self, so it could really slow down the abuse a little) and so that we reduce waste. And we should try to build as much independent and shared knowledge about the existing products as possible (knowledge includes software, drivers, repair plans, whatever). To minimize adding value to the evil vendors we should only publish knowledge about products that the vendor is no longer selling and priorize knowledge that prevents obsolescence of the old products. I reached this logical conclusion from trying to understand how Luc Verhaegen got frustrated. He seems to have reached the conclusion that constructively building a better world may be counterproductive.

The problem with that approach is society as usual. If you try to keep simple, save the world and personally survive to convince others, you'll have to face competition from those who only concentrate in surviving and can choose to do whatever you do or whatever else your ethics don't allow you to do but theirs do. It may mean not finding a job, not finding support in your community, or simply being frustrated because your device can't do something the neighbour's crap does.

So building new products that are more just, sustainable and hopefully able to displace the evil products is a survival alternative you may be tempted to pursue. And I don't think the market allows to do it all at once. So you'll find some products that fix one thing, other fix others, and none will score on all fronts. Hopefully we'll get there little by little. As a buyer this means you're still screwed, you can just choose it to be just a little softer here or there. Must be a coincidence but today I've seen two mails: one form a friend asking what smatphone to buy and one from tinkerphnes.org that said:

Therefore we discussed in a small circle what the core of Openmoko
and Openphoenux is.

It was easy to find what it is not:
* it is not a 100% fair phone (we don't have the resources to track
components - it is enough challenge to have it working and being produced)
* it is not a 100% open phone (we have not found a feasible solution for
WLAN and GPU)
* it is not a 100% secure phone (we can't do security audits of every
component)
* it is not a cutting edge phone (we do not get the latest and greatest
chips as mainstream manufacturers do)
* it is not a geeks (only) phone (we want everybody to be able to use
it)

But yet they try to do what they can instead of saying since I can't do it all I'll do nothing. It is very easy to find what we still don't like. I bet they want to make that list shorter when and as possible.
I don't think it's their fault it's not as easy as it should.

Other projects will pick other priorities, not because they wouldn't like to achieve everything, but because they just have so many resources. Rhombus Tech decided to use a cheap A20. They tend to document very openly their decisions, but I don't have a link to this one handy. Maybe they thought making sure a cheap and ubicous SOC had enough free software for RYF was more important than judging a company dismeneavours. I don't know.

So yes, Luke Leighton is no fool, I hope he can deliver a fully free system, and even if he can get enough source/licensing from Allwinner I doubt he'll manage to reform and redeem a megacorp like Allwinner. If he does, praise to him, but it's hard. If he doesn't reform Allwinner enough so that they don't rip free software authors off ever again (ever? how can we tell?), then buying Allwinner will still be funding people that not only do not help improve the world, but who actively undermine those who do. I mean I don't sympathize with proprietary software authors, but I understand people do not have to share my views, so I must understand people may do that and be consistent with their beliefs. Taking the work of those that build common knowledge and making it exactly the opposite of what they work for is much harder for me to empatize with. It's just bully. After all proprietary software is not even illegal yet, but not complying with GPL is. And that someone does this and no lawcase is brought, not imports are barred, etc. is dismal.

So not buying anything is reasonable, buying the A20 EOMA-68 card is not ideal, but it is possibly not worse than buying many other things, and better than buying most of the products out there (I doubt Allwinner is the only GPL violator). And I guess Luke starts with A20 because he thinks most people don't think like me. Buying a laptop or desktop without a CPU card is not such a bad idea. A little waste until they (or whoever) get a better CPU card out, but it helps a project with a nice concept. Why not?

About RYF certification, I understand it's hard enough as is. It could include providers not doing anything illegal (breaking GPL, breaking labour laws, buying stolen minerals, whatever) or providers not doing anything unethical, or not contributing funds to political parties that endorse software patens or whatever, but one has to stop somewhere. It would be a bit odd to include in a certification that involved companies must obey the law. One would expect that certification or not, companies that don't obey it are brought to court. Even when that expectation fails how does including it in the certification help? And concentrating on what you can do with the supplied hardware and software, or how likely an average consumer is to end up running proprietary software, or some such makes sense. This certification or any other is not the only thing to consider when decding your purchase.

I think the frustration with the appreciated concept and the unappreciated SOC provider, or the frustration with RYF certification and GPL violations is just a reflect of how bad the computer market is. It is more a market or society failure than a Rhombus Tech or FSF failure.

 

[diligentcircle]

It was pointed out that because of the GPL violations, everything that is produced by AllWinner is technically tainted.

If it is a technical issue, prove it. I'm not going to respond further to your meaningless arguments (or rather, FUD) that rely on this core assumption until you do. I don't have time for this.

The ThinkPad doesn't have RYF certification

Yes, it does. Specifically, two ThinkPad models sold by Minifree and Taranus (refurbished) are certified to respect your freedom. They're still the same ThinkPad computers assembled by IBM and still have the "ThinkPad" branding on them (though I think the Taranus X200 covers it with a sticker). RMS himself uses one of these computers now.

 

[Exophase]

This isn't a debate about morals, it is a fact: they made money off violating the GPL, have not made any strides at reparations, so everything they do is necessarily tainted with that money.

You think they'd have made less money had they not violated the GPL? I doubt it. Maybe there was a marginal amount of money saved by not going through the effort to keep up with the GPL, but I suspect this was all more a matter of social conditioning against wanting to release source even when they're legally required to and plain laziness. Maybe they think that they'd lose money by complying but it's probably not very rational.

Not to say that there aren't cases where money can be made by violating the GPL, I just don't think that applies here. They're a hardware company, their software is in support of their hardware and if anything keeping the software open would make it more likely that others would increase accessibility to their hardware and therefore increase sales.

If you, as a charity, are aware that the money being donated is from an assassin, but recognize that without it you would not survive, then you need to make peace with the fact that people are dying so that your charity can help others. Refuse the donation and it fails, and many people you would have helped lose.

I feel like you're making stronger causal links than are necessarily there. I mean, in this example why would you think refusing the money from the assassin would cause them to stop assassinating people? Maybe the assassin is only motivated to make money in that manner to contribute to your charity but probably not, and not really something you should assume.

But then again, I guess this is why people don't really try to actually apply purely utilitarian standards to their decisions because there's too much they just don't ever know.