Certified Hardware - Why purism and not system76 or thinkpenguin?

[Tai...@gmx.com]

Purism is selling snake oil and taking money away from the honest
companies that admit they're selling a re-badged quanta laptop that will
never ever have libre firmware.

Here is a reddit post with more info about the situation (yeah its from
leah but whatever its true)
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3anjgm/on_the_librem_laptop_purism_doesnt_believe_in/

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/certified-laptops/
"In addition, the Qubes team will receive a small portion of the revenue
from any Librem 13 sale that comes with Qubes pre-installed."
The man that is always behind the curtain.
Does one have to pay to be included on this list? how much? how come
real libre computer sellers like gluglug and raptor engineering aren't
listed on here?

If you want to be honest there are only two boards in the world period
that check all the qubes 4.0 boxes, the KCMA-D8 and the KGPE-D16 both of
which are legitimately libre blob free and also have a user configurable
TPM CRTM which is very important if you don't want your TPM to be
predictable.

Instead of putting in actual effort to make a real libre laptop with a
few ARM cpus, maybe an AMD FM2 (FM2+ has PSP) or something like that
they instead are satisfied "making" crappy quanta rebrands, taking
credit for other peoples work and acting like buying unfused cpus is a
revolutionary act.

The simple fact of the matter is that if google can't convince intel to
hand over the ME code, the FSP code, the VGA BIOS and the signing keys
for all of those then a small company with a 160K crowdfunding campaign
won't ever be able to do that, and even if google somehow did the
impossible it would apply to every intel device and not just theirs thus
making a purism purchase absolutely pointless.

[Michael Carbone]

Tai...@gmx.com:

Our hardware certification process:

https://www.qubes-os.org/hardware-certification/

We have had discussions with ~5-10 manufacturers, including those you
reference, and so far only Purism has followed through with the hardware
certification process for Qubes 3.x.

Note that Librems currently do not meet the requirements for Qubes 4.x
branch:

https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2016/07/21/new-hw-certification-for-q4/

We would love to have more manufacturers and hardware certified, both
for 3.x and 4.x. There are some (potentially) on the horizon, like:

https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-d16/

Feel free to search this mailing list for past discussions on Purism.

--
Michael Carbone

Qubes OS | https://www.qubes-os.org
@QubesOS <https://www.twitter.com/QubesOS>

PGP fingerprint: D3D8 BEBF ECE8 91AC 46A7 30DE 63FC 4D26 84A7 33B4