On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 1:08 AM, Jean Flamelle eaterjolly@gmail.com wrote:
I just thought I'd make a poke about this.
good idea.
Been a bit busy lately to contribute to the liberating chip or the standards thread, but will be getting back on those soon.
great. knock yourself out :)
No one has really mentioned conflict-free minerals, or does so often in the libre community. It's kinda like adding just one other complication to an already mess-y problem, but I'm interested to know more about the details and problems involved with paying attention to the actual mineral sourcing.
correct. libre means software... which is another area of highly specialist ethical expertise (the application of ethics to software).
conflict minerals is the application of specialist ethical expertise to the sourcing of materials.
I can imagine many OEM's don't publish or even pay attention to where they get minerals from, so I imagine the potential parts list dwindles beyond reason at simply limiting one's self to OEM's that at least list their mineral sources, much less then actually trying to them limit it based on the fairly subjective "conflict-free" qualification.
fairphones does.... but they then screwed up by not bothering with the ethical issues of ensuring that the operating system was actually... legal to distribute. so all the Fairphone 1 products they designed are basically a ticking landfill timebomb.... ENTIRELY DEFEATING the whole fucking point of the exercise.
they still have not resolved the use of the GPL-violating Mediatek OS distributed with that phone, meaning that they have LOST ALL RIGHTS TO DISTRIBUTE PRODUCT - including the Fairphone 2 and all future products.
the way that they can fix that is to ask every single contributor to u-boot and the linux kernel for their distribution rights back, but first obtain the full GPLv2 source to that Mediatek OS.
alcatel did this (alcatel is one of the main sources of mediatek GPLv2 compliant source code).
Fairphones did not.
so.
what do you think of that, jean? should we go out and buy Fairphone products?
l.