| "Buy one of these phones because its a stepping stone to what you really want." Part of the backlash against purism is that they market themselves as a fully libre platform when they are not. Many viewed that as trying to cash in on the desire for a truly libre laptop. From their website > Purism’s Librem products are the only modern high-end devices where you are in control and have complete visibility into the operating system, all bundled software, and the deeper levels of your computer. Emphases added. This is false, or at best misleading. You don't have complete visibility into the Intel Management Engine. Only after their initial release have they managed to strip the ME down to a fraction of its original size, but its still there doing who knows what. Purism started during a time when concerns behind management engines were gaining a lot of traction. They capitalized on those fears by marketing a laptop with "complete visibility" without actually delivering on that. They are a step in the right direction, but they don't market themselves as that. It makes things harder for people like Raptor Computer Systems who actually deliver "completely visible" machines as from the marketing its easy to assume that their products are equally free/libre, so why pay extra for the Raptor products? > If you have the money to spend, then spend it. Consider it a donation to the cause. If you have money to spend, spend it on a Raptor machine that is _actually_ completely visible, or donate it to a reverse engineer working on libre drivers, or a hardware engineer working on libre designs. |