Hi,
well, this is no secret, there are of course non-free firmware parts in the Librem laptops, this is almost impossible to avoid. Devices like laptops contain a dozen or more CPUs, all of which need some form of software, aka firmware. There is e.g. the embedded controller, the touchpad controller, the Wifi chip, the Bluetooth chip, the storage devices (NVME or SATA) etc. Many of these have their firmware included in silicon, like in a ROM or flash space they come with. Some others do need a firmware download at runtime.
The current state on the Librem laptops is that we do not ship any firmware that needs to get loaded at runtime. This has to do with security issues and also with freedom issues around runtime loaded firmwares. What we also do is that we try to free firmwares as much as possible, like we got rid of the proprietary BIOS and replaced it with Coreboot. Are we there yet and fully free and open? No. But we are working hard on it and solve the puzzle piece by piece.
Cheers
nicole