[Dev] Parabola as an option for Purism Librem laptops

[Josh Branning]

As I mentioned, I am not officially affiliated with parabola but I can't 
see why you shouldn't be able to do this, parabola being free software 
and all. The only problem you might have is if someone who buys a key 
asks for the sources, then you'd still have to supply them in a 
reasonable time frame, because of the licensing conditions.

The best way to see if the iso will run on a usb key, is to dd the iso 
yourself and test. It shouldn't be too difficult; you appear proficient 
enough. And I think you may be correct in thinking that this should work.

The licence (GPL) also states that there are no extra restrictions (eg. 
commercial): You are allowed to sell copies. Of course, you cannot 
change the terms of the licence without everybody who contributed to the 
parabola base agreeing, so legally you must make sure that you are able 
to provide the sources, if they are requested by your customers.

As you or your customers are, or will be, generally using the usb as an 
installation medium, that should run in ram (may be wrong on this), and 
not a 'portable installation' of parabola, really you shouldn't need to 
pacstrap. Instead, dd should suffice and be just fine.

Someone can correct me if anything I have said is wrong or out of the 
ordinary,


Josh

> I'll try to answer to multiple questions at once.
>
> First to clear things a bit: we do not want to fork Parabola GNU/Linux.
> We find it great as it is and we want to provide it to our customers AS
> IT IS. Since we are more leaned towards Debian GNU/Linux, we are using
> our PureOS (derivative of Debian but GNU FSDG compliant - or at least
> that's what we are trying to accomplish) as our base system.
>
> Bottom of line: we simply want to get the official ISO image from your
> website and "burn" it (with `dd` or something like that) to an USB key.
> If you have other suggestion for us regarding this, we are listening.
>
> Parabola GNU/Linux will be optional, on an USB key, charged only a small
> fee for the device itself (we don't intend to have any margins here).
>
> Cheers,
>
> - --
> Mladen Pejaković
> Purism support