Re: Why don't gnu.org and RMS sign mail? - FDE Crypto

[Alexandre François Garreau]

Le mardi 5 novembre 2019 04:09:45 CET, vous avez écrit :
>   > Purism do not respect users’ freedom:
>   > https://libreboot.org/faq.html#will-the-purism-laptops-be-supported
> That statement is true at one level, unfair at another level.

> This is not entirely satisfactory, I agree.  But it isn't Purism's
> fault.  People must make up their own minds about whether this
> is good enough, but don't condemn Purism for it.

Respecting users’ freedom would be selling libreboot(able)ed machines, as 
these are already easy to get, make, sell, and/or buy.  They claim doing so, 
while it’s not true.

The problem is their marketing and campaigning is full of hyperboles, and 
exclusively turned around themselves, never speaking about alternatives or 
other initiatives… and yet this is to be expected from a company managing big 
quantities of money, it is much more unfair when this communication is about 
freedom, community and sharing.

They contribute to transform into an arbitrary added-value label (that is: 
lux) “freedom” and maybe even one day “ryf” (such as what happened to 
“organic” or “biological” with green-washing… so is happening with 
“openwashing” (…and now even “librewashing” thanks purism)), so it becomes 
much less meaningful and stable, and much more arbitrary and market-dependent, 
while becoming unaccessible to the poors (who would best need it), while until 
now free software has always been something actually *more* known (if not 
proportionally, at least in absolute) and accessible among them. [0]

On the other side, ThinkPenguin is precisely at the same level of freedom-
respect (even more, as they already sell several RYF products), while being a 
lot less unfair in their marketing and communication: they’re not the best, 
but they sell useful stuff, for a price it may be worth.

ThinkPenguin do not say they’re the “best” (implying the rest is strictly 
worse, wich is a lie), they’re “to be bought”, “to be pure”, or anything so 
moralizing (hence culpabizing) as purism.  Purism, through their website (and 
to some extent its name too) makes it look like their stuff is a “must”, “to be 
own” that shall not be missed or then you’re missing or failing something (so 
maybe if you’re too poor for it you’re too poor for free software (at least 
that might what they website might reflect (while they sell specially recent 
and high-performance hardware bound with special paid support (in that extent 
they’re maybe even participating in “service replacing product” modern 
economic trend)))).  To see this in market is to be expected, but for a 
special-software-freedom company, rooted in free-software community, this is 
new and affraying.

[0] within the current state of affairs, and FSF long having been on lower 
freedom and moral standards than GNU, I fear without you it may grows even 
worse and effectively one day become that (as it is currently still FSF 
delivering the RYF label).