Updating Firmware on the Librem 5

Hardware Librem 5
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Doubtful, in my opinion. Binary blob - Wikipedia

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I see. Thank you. So more realistic to have future Librem 5 version X with 100% free firmware/hardware

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It is a hard job for a little company to provide all it needs to make a device fully free. So sure, there is a chance that future versions will be completely free, but I would not count on it, yet. There are still more important tasks to solve to make L5 a device that more people can daily drive than nowadays.

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To be clear: Purism still hopes to have the FSF agree that the Librem 5 is RYF ( Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification requirements | RYF ) . That would require that, in regard to updates to non-Free firmware, be assumed “not intended after the user obtains the product”.

Purism supplying an application that checked whether there are updates to non-Free firmware would defeat that assumption.

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<opinion>

Near future? No!

Any future? Not all blobs are created equal. A sensible person would have to look at the potential risks of the blob and benefits from de-blobbing v. the difficulty of doing so.

Consider the touchscreen v. the cellular modem.

I think most people would decide that in a mobile phone the benefits of deblobbing the cellular modem are the highest, compared with the other blackbox components - but someone can always argue otherwise.

(It is vaguely possible that in the future a cellular modem module becomes available that out-of-the-box comes with open firmware and which works in the Librem 5, in which case it may be an option for you to upgrade the module i.e. carefully remove existing module and install new module.)

Here’s another crazy crystal ball claim … AI will mean that reverse engineering can be done easily and quickly. I would love that to be true. I don’t know how realistic it is. Also: reverse engineering doesn’t get rid of legal or contractual issues.

No.

You should update a blob under select conditions, including but not limited to,

  • you are directed to by Purism Support because you are experiencing a specific problem that is resolved by a different version of a blob
  • you are experiencing a problem and you punt that a different version of a blob will resolve the problem
  • reliable information becomes available that there is a security issue with the version of a blob that you have
  • reliable information becomes available that a later version of a blob contains new functionality that you are interested in using

Randomly updating firmware could in fact be a recipe for instability.

</opinion>

So the corollary would seem to be that the script would have to come from the community.

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