it’s not relevant if they want it or not … an open-hardware ecosystem does not easily lend itself to unjust power … more like they can NOT if it is fully free-software > see the GNU project and FSF.
what about a “monopoly” on free-software ? how would they do that practically with GPL and releasing the schematics and the rest after a certain time has passed ?
Had a brief look at the schematics and found it interesting that a controller for near-field comms (the PN7150 from NXP) was removed in rev. 06.
It seems some interrupt is still routed to a header, so maybe possible to retrofit on an extension PCB. I’m dreaming of using NFC for contactless two-factor auth with a U2F device…
If there are other companies making clones of the Librem 5, then it is a sign of its success, so I’m hoping to see lots of clones. 
One element that establishes trust is the wisdom of crowds. You may not be able to verify what a piece of electronics does, but you trust that that someone in the community can do that for you. If thousands of people have used something, then we trust that it is good. Maybe we shouldn’t, but we do.
Right! This is the point I was trying to make. Guess I should leave the Socratic method to Socrates… I don’t appear to be very effective with it 
To be honest, I don’t think one can clone the librem5 from the 20+ pages of PDF. Redoing the layout and gerbers is similar to redesigning the thing from scratch :-). But they are still hughly useful for the community to understand how the thing is wired up. People in the community have been discovering the JTAG Debug connections for example, and as a result our Documentor-in-Chief @david.boddie has filed an issue to document its usage in the developer documentation. THAT is a very tangible effect of the kind of transparency the schematics provide.
Loving that the schematics are out. Here’s to the future of ethical hardware and software.
Two questions here, both related.
1: Are there any exposed contact pads on the board for things like GPIO, I2C, UART, etc? (maybe even power input)
2: Is there any reference for what those contact pads connect to (if it’s not labelled on the board itself)?
I couldn’t see anything like this on the schematics - note that this isn’t the internal wiring, vias, etc; just the parts accessible on the outer surfaces.
The reason being is that I’m wondering what possibilities might exist for DIY addons which would need to connect to internal headers (most likely by designing and ordering some custom flexible circuit boards which are the right shape to press against the exposed contact points).
The killer example would probably be an NFC chip and coil which one could slip inside the back cover, but what I really want is to make an interposer between the SIM card and the modem which connects to GPIO pins (or other suchlike) on both ends.
What this would do is make it so that some software running on the main CPU would have to actively read and then re-transmit any messages between the modem and the SIM card in order for them to be able to talk. This would make you completely immune to SIMJacker-type attacks, as you could then firewall out unusual requests with the message forwarding software (plus, you’d be able to learn more about how the system works when you can see its internal communications).