Purism deserves a lot of credit for the following activities which all aid in right to repair:
- Selecting components which use FOSS drivers and gets updates from the manufacturer, so it is easier to keep upgrading to the latest kernel, and the community can keep supporting the hardware, even when the manufacturer no longer maintains the drivers,
- Selecting components with longer support cycles from the manufacturers, so the hardware is more likely to receive proprietary firmware updates in the future,
- Working to add mainline Linux kernel support for the hardware in the Librem 5, so it is easy to upgrade to the latest kernel in the future,
- Designing Phosh as a thin overlay on top of standard Linux+wlroots +Wayland+GTK+GNOME, and upsteaming its changes to that parent software, so it is easier to upgrade Phosh in the future to take advantage of improvements in the ecosystem,
- Working to make standard GNOME apps adaptive and touch friendly for mobile screens rather than designing their own apps that are likely to be poorly maintained in the future. In other words, Purism is improving the GNOME ecosystem, rather than trying to make its own siloed ecosystem like Ubuntu Touch, WebOS, Tizen and Firefox OS, which is hard to maintain.
- Working to get much of Purism’s own software development (Calls, Chatty, libhandy and libadwaita) accepted as official GNOME projects, so they will be better maintained in the future.
- Being the first phone manufacturer to promise lifetime software updates (which is a credible promise for all the reasons listed above that should lower the cost of providing kernel and Phosh updates in the future),
- Providing Coreboot/PureBoot updates for its older PC models which are out of production.
- Designing the first phone in history with whose wireless communications (WiFi/BT and cellular modem) use standardized connectors and form factors so they can be replaced or upgraded with standard parts,
- Designing the first phone with free/open schematics since the GTA04 in 2012, which should make it easier to do board repair (although it would be much easier if Purism would release the CAD files so people can identify where each component is placed on the boards),
- Releasing the STL files for the Librem 5 case, so third parties can design their own replacement cases.
However, an important component of right to repair is the ability to get replacement parts, and in that area, Purism has not done well. Kudos for selling replacement power adapters and batteries (and cellular modems for the Librem 5) on the web site and for using standardized form factors for the RAM, SSD and WiFi/BT cards that can be obtained from third party providers, but getting replacement parts for the non-standard components (screens, cases, keyboards, touchpads, circuit boards and heat sink/cooling fan) is a big problem.
I understand the economics of small-scale custom manufacturing, which make it hard for Purism to stock replacement parts, but I would encourage the company to try to order extra parts when manufacturing, so it has some in stock that it can sell, or maybe offer to buy or trade-in broken units, so it can resell the used components on its web site.
I make this recommendation, because I still haven’t bought the Librem 14 due to my fear that I won’t be able to fix it if it breaks, so I have kept buying Thinkpads, because I know that I can get replacement parts off eBay. On my own laptops, I have seen screens, cooling fans, keyboards, touch pads and hinges all fail, so I am reluctant to take a risk buying any laptop that I can’t fix.
I understand that Purism can’t publish the schematics and board views on their laptops since they are based on Intel’s copyrighted reference designs, but System76 will send the proprietary schematics for its Clevo laptops to customers who send in the serial number for their machines, which aids in doing board-level repair (like Louis Rossmann does for Macbooks). I would like to see Purism to match System76/Clevo in this regard.