The “Respects Your Freedom” certification program encourages the creation and sale of hardware that will do as much as possible to respect your freedom and your privacy, and will ensure that you have control over your device.
and it is designed as a promotion for retailers who sell such devices
That is why the Free Software Foundation launched this certification program, to find retailers committed to providing users with devices they can truly own.
You misunderstood. My link was for the thread and especially the message where someone included an instructions from Purism support for updating the proprietary firmware.
And then you seemed to not grasp the intention behind the code and links in Purism’s software repository for flashing firmware Librem5 / firmware-tps6598x-nonfree · GitLab (that’s the PD controller). That is intention. They also have code for flashing your cellular firmware and links to it.
I’ll replace that with “contractors”. It doesn’t make too much different in my mind.
It is my understanding that everyone who works at Purism except for the officers are 1099s (i.e. independent contractors). I suppose we could get @JCS to verify his status. I’m assuming that he is a 1099 employee, but I believe he has said that he works for Purism.
… which they intentionally make difficult by not posting the link. It is true that a customer posted a link (which was very likely not supposed to happen).
Purism support specifically requested that I do not disclose the instructions for updating the modem firmware, so I have respected their wishes until @lakei’s post mentioned above was created and after most of the original Purism support employees have already left.
That appears to have been updated to: Actually, Purism doesn’t really mind if you distribute the instructions. You are just not allowed to distribute the underlying files without which the instructions are useless.
But the instructions I have seen have links to the files from the vendor. That makes the instruction not worthless. They wouldn’t distribute the instructions if they were worthless would they?
Purism is approved by the vendor to privately/individually provide firmware update packages to fix customer issues, but these resources are not intended for public dissemination.
The firmware update documentation itself is not controlled, so I added the instructions to the official documentation for convenience, and simply omitted the links to the protected files.
If you’re looking at the cellular modem link and presume I haven’t read that and see that the user who posted it a moderator blacked out the URL after the fact, it’s a bad presumption. But I will point out that support certainly gave the instructions with the URL. And it doesn’t take a genius (only google-fu) to find that the link is <<censored by moderator - seriously, dude!>> which if you unzip it has the nonfree firmware. Distributed from puri.sm. Intention.
Or one could simply look at the BroadMobi operations manual and go right to the section entitled “Updating Firmware” where they describe how to upgrade the firmware from windows. It’s in their FCC documents. So, at least BroadMobi had the intention that people would need to update firmware after delivery. Of course their instructions require Windows … which is a bigger obstruction to Purism customers than most
I’m not sure if it wasn’t originally blacked out by the poster. I am confident, though, that when Purism support gave that user the instructions, it included a non-blacked out URL for the download. That said, the link to the Purism hosted zip file that contains the non-free driver was still easy to find.
No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose. I’ll take the action to secure those files on Nextcloud. Sharing links to protected files hosted on Purism servers is a quick way to have those files locked down. It’s a matter of a business agreement/relationship with the product vendor; we must be careful to not bite the hand that feeds. I’m an advocate of sharing as much as possible, but it’s not worth a cease-and-desist and/or losing future access.
I understand, but my point stands. These restrictions will not change until we have a follow-up discussion with the vendor. It’s professional courtesy.
