Alright, I’ll come out and say it: I’m optimistic about the Purism / Librem project. The impending release of their first product is really exciting. Their goals are extremely ambitious (the hallmark of a worthwhile project) and despite having come up short of their stated goals and receiving some harsh though justified critique on the web, they’ve still produced a laptop that’s shipping soon. And so my optimism is holding out.

This is my first post on this topic and is mostly introductory: basically why I care about the project and the subject in general. My goal is to develop a series of posts discussing freedom and security (two things that I’m convinced are related) in the context of general purpose computing and the Purism Librem laptop. If you love freedom, free software and computer security, read on … if not, read on anyways.

Criticism from the Web

Not everyone is as impressed with Purism as I am, and the best articulation I’ve found is from Alexandru Gagniuc on the coreboot blog. The TL;DR is that people have been working in the free hardware space for a long time. The impression is that Purism showed up and claimed that they could do in 6 months what others have been working towards for years. Many have taken this as a sign that something is amiss. Those working in OSS see this sort of stuff all the time: someone shows up on your mailinglist with big plans, lots of enthusiasm … and then they figure out how much work it will take and you never hear from them again. I’m hopeful that, despite falling short of their initial goals, the folks at Purism stick around and continue to chip away at their stated goals.

Something that I find particularly troubling is the increasing rhetoric on the Purism website around “fighting for your freedom” all while hedging on past promises. The new video on their homepage with the young cartoon woman flying their flag and weeping cartoon tears for her lost freedoms has set my instinctive negative reaction to over-the-top marketing into high gear. Add to this some genuine and public concerns over the claims made by Purism and I’d say that they’ve got a bit of digging to do if they want to get out of this hole.

Lesson to learn: Grand or unrealistic claims about security, privacy-preserving and software freedom won’t go unnoticed or unchallenged when your target audience knows what’s up. Purism is catering to a niche market. Their target audience is extremely savvy about these things and they’re not going to be shy about “calling bullshit”. Skeptics are going to be skeptical, they’re going to demand proof. This is a good thing.

Continued Optimism

Despite all of this, I’m still optimistic about the project. Even better, the folks at Purism seem to be paying attention to their critics. They’ve published a road map detailing the steps necessary to reach their stated goal of FSF RYF (respects your freedom) certification. No doubt it’s going to be an uphill battle and the folks over at coreboot may be right: the entirety of the firmware may never be OSS. But having an OEM who actually wants to fight for the user will never be a bad thing so long as they don’t alienate their target audience in the process. In a time when OEMs are getting busted for integrating ad/spy-ware into their firmware we need a change.

The Future: Freedom and Security

This is probably going to get dangerously close to an attempt to predict the future, but I’m very hopeful for Purism and their products. I haven’t been following too closely but when I looked the other day, sure enough the specs for the Librem 15 list a TPM and it’s a version 2. Sweet. More on this in a future post.

Additionally, the FSF has endorsed CrowdSupply (the crowd funding platform used by Purism). I’m trying not to read too far into this but I can’t help but think that this represents an organized push from free software movement into hardware while adopting the pro-security-and-privacy rhetoric that’s become so relevant in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

I generally think of myself as a pragmatist when it comes to running purely open source software. This may just be a result of the need to load proprietary / binary firmware to get the wireless card on my laptop to function properly. It also could be related to my love of security technologies and the fact that the FSF has taken such a hard-line in their labeling of the TPM as malicious, a position I’ve always viewed as misinformed. I’m hopeful that the Purism project can help mend the rift between the free software movement and the security technologies that are essential to preserving our freedoms in an increasingly hostile computing environment.

This post was a sort of introduction, just some background about why I care about the Purism project. In my next post I’m hoping to get into why I think freedom and security have become so closely related. Stay tuned.