System76's first in-house Laptop Virgo will have a open source Motherboard design. Licensed under GPLv3

RecursiveDescent@discuss.tchncs.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 365 points –
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Test it with OpenBSD and with a Linux-libre distribution to verify how open the hardware is.

The GPU and WiFi drivers are going to be the major limitations here. All GPU and WiFi vendors now require proprietary blobs in order to function.

No. OpenBSD develops their own drivers fot Intel iGPU l, 2.5Gb ethernet, and wi-fi. They don't have.license to include them in base, they download the firmware after first reboot if there's a basic ethernet connection.

The source code is publicly available from OpenBSD firmware folder on server, but cannot be included in the base installation.

I've only used Linux-libre when it comes to fully free systems. There is no option to download proprietary firmwares on a GNU/Linux-libre distro.

Are the firmwares distributed as blobs, or as source-available (proprietary-licensed) code?

For OpenBSD firmware? They are not blobs but are binary installs as there is no such thing as a source installation, everything has to be compiled and build before it can be installed.

I believe OpenBSD firmware has an ISC license attached to them, but since OpenBSD developers develop the firmware, they don't have legal license from Intel to distribute in base, but I'm pretty sure that OpenBSD firmware has an ISC license for freedom.

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