Your requirements probably aren't too far off of one of our Blackbird systems -- I suspect it's just the form factor (micro-ATX) that's the problem. You might even be able to do the pull plug for minutes trick with a suitably sized lithium battery tucked inside the slimline chassis. ;)
Your products target "Freedom, no matter the costs" while their products aim for "better than what the market has right now, at consumer friendly price points".
Both are important: they demonstrate that there's mass market appeal, you demonstrate that there's an achievable ultimate goal.
If you want to join forces, there needs to be a common story that works for both. Right now, their story isn't sufficiently Free-with-capital-F for you and your story isn't sufficiently consumer-compatible for them.
I just gave them a path to a desktop that is POWER based, with very low up front costs (basically take their existing Thelio chassis, swap mainboards from x86 to POWER, do some software builds of Pop!_OS, and do a trial launch). I think that's a far more reasonable initial trial than going for a full laptop. It's also relatively consumer friendly, especially in today's cloud era where the proprietary apps people are using might just well be behind a web browser in the first place.
If they were a laptop-only company I'd agree with your assessment (I'm not happy with the GPU situation at all, that's the primary blocker for a libre laptop), but they're a laptop and desktop company. That means there's more ways they can test market owner controlled systems than a full up laptop design with massive design + tooling costs for an uncertain return.
I suspect that the laptops are their mass market driver though. Note how S76 has laptops + desktops, Purism has laptops + phone stuff, and Pine64 has laptops, phones and watches.
All of them do laptops plus some excentricity that may or may not translate in good future business: desktop systems are excentric these days and apparently they're not even the most popular pick when branching out, phones are.
For embedded and laptop devices, are there power devices or other options for truly free firmware?
The desktop price point on current boxes are still high, do you foresee those prices dropping in the future?
Will newer POWER architectures create a large workload for you or is it more simple?
- cal
Price point is not likely to drop until we reach a largely self sufficient critical mass of users, developers, and software. Only x86 has crossed that threshold right now, so it's clearly a high bar. Still, the more users we have, the more possibility for pricing drops in the future!
New POWER is near seamless from a software perspective, just like on x86. Upgrade kernel, keep using your existing software installs. And since POWER is now an open ISA, that software will basically keep working forever -- if you needed to reimplement it on a 22nd century FPGA due to lack of hardware, you're legally able to do so. This is not the case for x86 or ARM.
I've been looking for one and I have the same concerns you do, and right now the only thing I realistically see if I want completely open is a thinkpad x200/t400 flashed with libreboot.
Nothing I do with secure data hard-requires that level of portability, and for insecure (tracked, DRMed, closed + signed firmware) mobile use a Lineage smartphone is good enough for what I do. A laptop with closed / signed firmware simply doesn't gain me anything worth having over the phone.
My personal desktop is a Blackbird. The couple of old x86 apps I can't easily ditch (because they are open source but need MVC APIs and I'm too lazy to write the shim layer) I just forward X over SSH to an old corebooted Opteron box.
Can you put a POWER "base station" of sorts in your dorm / apartment and use a low power secure terminal, like a corebooted C201, to access it over an encrypted link?
I've done something like this when I had to travel last -- was able to maintain a stable link back to one of my POWER machines so the lack of local computing power on the laptop didn't matter. Really hate that Chromebook touchpad though. ;)
Both. Copyright applies to some aspects, patents to others, and then you also get into trademark rights. With the US having embraced effectively permanent copyright, ISAs will not be freely able to be implemented unless their owner expressly allows it (my understanding is that the Oracle vs. Google case solidified this thinking).
Fundamentally, that means you get to pick from RISC-V, POWER, or SPARC when selecting a well known ISA for your new device, or start signing licensing agreements (which always come with restrictions and oftentimes significant royalties).
How are you claiming open source firmware when your hardware requires signed, closed source binaries to even begin to boot? I refer specifically to the Intel Management Engine, which incidentally is why we gave up on x86 many years ago.
How did you solve the GPU closed, signed firmware problem for discrete GPUs? How about the WiFi card firmware?
I understand your decision to try to keep compatibility with games and Windows, but the result is only partly open source, and that is not what these headlines read.
I know we would be interested in assisting System76 (or other prebuilt system OEMs) to start offering POWER products as true open source, owner controlled alternatives to Intel and AMD. For instance, we currently manufacture and sell mainboards that would be a perfect fit for your existing Thelio cases, that work very well with (optional) powerful AMD GPUs -- there's also a 2D HDMI graphics option for true blob-free operation. All you need to do is qualify our mainboard in your devices, and offer software support -- it's a very low risk investment all things considered but would allow System76 to sell truly open source systems vs. partly closed ones.
Is there some possible room for collaboration here? The GPU, WiFi, etc. firmware questions are honest questions -- the firmware is potential issue, and the more OEMs/ODMs that work this problem simultaneously in collaboration the higher the chance of a solution being found that will allow even those devices to be freed up and made secure.