> While the result, after booting, is effectively the same.
I'm not sure it's exactly the same. First, because having embedded firmware formed an incentive for hardware manufacturers to test stuff and fix bugs before hitting the market. Second, because who gets to push updates to our machine has serious political/security implications. We have reached a situation where the OS we choose to run has less and less control over our computing, and i find that worrying.
> it’s not a deal breaker for me, as long as the blobs are freely redistributable
Thanks for your explanation. I can completely respect this position, although i personally disagree. If you ever get the chance to bring up the issue (libre firmware/drivers and librebooting), please spare a minute to raise our disenchantment and mention the possibility to work with other distros (such as Debian, who also has ties to Lenovo) hand-in-hand with hardware manufacturers to improve the situation for everyone.
I don't exactly have any hope for it, but having Lenovo publish its entire hardware specs and playing nice with maintainers to provide libre firmware would definitely inspire confidence in their hardware. For the moment, it seems only Librem and Pine64 (and a few others) are manufacturers that can be approached on that topic. But like the original author (mmu_man) suggested, software freedom should be for everyone, not just people investing in specific hardware... and i'm pretty sure he would be thrilled to work on Haiku support for his Lenovo hardware given proper documentation ;)
I'm not sure it's exactly the same. First, because having embedded firmware formed an incentive for hardware manufacturers to test stuff and fix bugs before hitting the market. Second, because who gets to push updates to our machine has serious political/security implications. We have reached a situation where the OS we choose to run has less and less control over our computing, and i find that worrying.
> it’s not a deal breaker for me, as long as the blobs are freely redistributable
Thanks for your explanation. I can completely respect this position, although i personally disagree. If you ever get the chance to bring up the issue (libre firmware/drivers and librebooting), please spare a minute to raise our disenchantment and mention the possibility to work with other distros (such as Debian, who also has ties to Lenovo) hand-in-hand with hardware manufacturers to improve the situation for everyone.
I don't exactly have any hope for it, but having Lenovo publish its entire hardware specs and playing nice with maintainers to provide libre firmware would definitely inspire confidence in their hardware. For the moment, it seems only Librem and Pine64 (and a few others) are manufacturers that can be approached on that topic. But like the original author (mmu_man) suggested, software freedom should be for everyone, not just people investing in specific hardware... and i'm pretty sure he would be thrilled to work on Haiku support for his Lenovo hardware given proper documentation ;)