New subject: Fund a TALOS Secure Workstation as coreboot build system

3 Dec 2016


      Hey all,
...
...
I pledge 1,000 $.
Awesome!
I think we are far more than half by now!
For those who did not read (all) Updates, here is an excellent write-up
on (vendor) hardware lockdown and its consequences for the free software
world. [0]
(for those of you who don't know about it already...)
...
People care, and ~$380k over 280+ pledges confirms this. But the TALOS
project is asking for about an order of magnitude more funding, and
2-100x more money per working end product, than pretty much any other
CrowdSupply hardware platform crowdfunding effort likely to be of
interest to free software people (Novena, Librem 13, Librem 15,
EOMA68, USB Armory, etc).
They surely target another group than the projects you mentioned. Not only
in that Talos is more expensive (i.e. many people cannot afford it) than
other free hardware projects, but also that probably most of them do not
need such a powerful workstation -- at least for me, that's the case.
But if you need the power and can spend $2k on a workstation, you can also
spend $4k.
And btw. Librem is shit, freedom-wise.
...
I realise that the TALOS is unique in its combination of technologies,
and that these technologies were chosen for very good reasons. But I
also realise that not many people can afford to buy a $7100 computer,
especially if one of the existing Libreboot or coreboot-supported
devices would meet most of their needs.
As for the non-hardware options TALOS offers, I suspect people have
some difficulty justifying making charitable donations towards a
for-profit enterprise, or paying for SaaSS under a time limit and with
only fairly limited use-cases.
To me, the point of this campaign is not to get cool free hardware, but to
create/restore the very foundations that are needed to have them, i.e.
research (so we can build on that and have that knowledge) and development
(so we / other people have the ability to buy free and high-performance
computing hardware).
Really, if you're reading a bit on what's going on in the world regarding
the freedom of hardware (e.g. article above, more and more lockdowns), imo
it's easily justified to spend a few hundred dollars or, if you can, a few
thousands for it -- without obtaining any actual hardware.
That said, I think the most important thing is now 1) spreading the word, and
2) pulling oneself together to spend some money "just" for our digital freedom.
Just imagine that *awesome* moment when Talos got funded, knowing that *you*
were an indispensable part of it!
I think that's easily worth it.
Regards,
Merlin
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-secure-workstatio...
-- 
Merlin Büge toni@bluenox07.de

Re: [coreboot] Fund a TALOS Secure Workstation as coreboot build system