[Dev] Misleading information in EOMA68 news

[Christopher Waid]

On 2016-08-24 06:25 AM, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
> Le mardi 23 août 2016 à 11:24 -0300, Adonay Felipe Nogueira a écrit :
>> Just now, I **have** subscribed to Parabola's dev mailing list. So 
>> I'll
>> try to catch-up with this topic. :)
>> 
>> I'm inserting libreplanet-discuss and trisquel-users mailing lists as
>> recipients of this email because of my opinion on Tiberiu-Cezar
>> Tehnoetic's message
>> (<https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-August/004353.html>).
>> 
>> I'm also inserting a member of ThinkPenguin as recipient so as to let
>> him know the issue found by Tiberiu-Cezar Tehnoetic, which is 
>> discussed
>> furthermore in this email.
>> 
>> I agree with Paul Kocialkowski's original message
>> (<https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-August/004341.html>).
>> Furthermore, my **last** edit in the original pad
>> (<https://pad.riseup.net/p/parabola-news-libre-tea-computer>) is 
>> perhaps
>> the most correct one (if the timeslider references don't change over
>> time, it should be
>> <https://pad.riseup.net/p/parabola-news-libre-tea-computer/timeslider#2238>, 
>> saved July 24th, 2016. After this version, the misleading text gets 
>> added).
> 
> Feel free to contribute to the revision pad:
> https://pad.partidopirata.com.ar/p/parabola-eoma
> 
> Others: what do you think of this version? Please acknowledge when you 
> think
> it's ready. At this point, revision 310 suits me fine:
> https://pad.partidopirata.com.ar/p/parabola-eoma/timeslider#310
> 
> However, I would gladly skip the part following "However, it's 
> important to note
> that:". Providing details there seems like a very slippery slope and 
> I'd rather
> link to relevant posts or information from the campaign page. Better 
> yet,
> quoting parts from there would be even more appropriate.
> 
> For instance, "2D and video acceleration work well with free software", 
> while
> being true, is not precise enough to be a really useful information. 
> Also, the
> part about the circuit board is too vague, since only the EOMA68 card 
> (and not
> the landing board or laptop board) were said to be withheld.
> 
>> About Tiberiu-Cezar Tehnoetic's message
>> (<https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-August/004353.html>):
>> Indeed, the use of "free software friendly" to also mean "fully free
>> software" or "freedom-respecting" is a communication noise (article on
>> Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_noise>).
>> Basically, in context of marketing (not sales), a communication noise
>> happens when **either** the senders or receivers of a message
>> distort-or-misunderstand the message.
>> 
>> Besides, I'm inserting a member of ThinkPenguin as recipient of this
>> email so as to let him know the issue that Tiberiu-Cezar Tehnoetic 
>> found
>> in ThinkPenguin's website content. This was done so as to make it 
>> easier
>> for ThinkPenguin to see the issue. This **is not** meant to be taken
>> offensively.
> 
> They may agree that it's an issue or not. I don't think it is one.
> For the record, you're probably referring to "Company #2" from:
> https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-August/004353.html

If the world were perfect I might fix this imperfection immediately. 
Every small fix takes time though and time is not something we have. We 
can't afford to waste it on minor issues. We have many many small issues 
yet to deal with after eight years and many many much bigger issues. If 
it took a fine tooth comb to find an issue it's probably not worth 
dealing with [immediately].

When this text was written LibreBoot didn't exist and I was probably the 
only person who had even looked into the possibility of porting CoreBoot 
to newer systems or free'ing it [this was around 2009]. It also was the 
case that all the core components [chipsets, like wifi, graphics, etc] 
were free so within the context of the day it was adequately describing 
I think, even if not a perfect choice of words to the extant that 
anybody else would have understood them.

When I say big issues I'm talking about things like getting sources 
released for newer CPUs/SOCs, reverse engineering components, targeting 
the FCC so we can overcome restrictions on the release of and ability to 
get code [in practice], designing new hardware, etc.

If you understand and think about the underlying issues and start nit 
picking you'd quickly realize not only are we imperfect, but so is the 
wording on every other site. We still don't have any free laptops. 
Utilizing the word free to describe almost any laptop would be 
technically wrong [including systems with LibreBoot]. I can think of one 
exception and that is the Ben NanoNote [if this even counts as a laptop, 
I wouldn't call it that]. The next best thing is going to be the Libre 
Tea Computer Card when combined with the related laptop housing 
components [also free] and that's only happening because we've been 
sponsoring its development and working with Luke on it for years. Why 
this is better is because we have the complete set of code for numerous 
components including microcode, keyboard/LCD controller firmware, 
bootloader, and more... so yes.. we could go back and fix these ancient 
issues nobody has even noticed until now or we could just work on 
solving the problems so we can replace these not-quite-perfect systems 
with ones that are [which if I understand the issue should also solve 
said problems].