Free
Software is owned by its community of users and creators, for the
benefit of that community, and of human society in general. Free
Software respects the autonomy and privacy of its users — especially
important in this age when so many companies base their business on
control and surveillance of their customers.
But all software runs on hardware, and similar considerations apply. In order to maintain control over our software we also need hardware devices that respect the autonomy and privacy of their users.
This
is a vast topic. My goal for this talk is more modest: A tour of some
hardware that's friendly to Free Software, in the hope that you might
learn about something you can use. My main focus will be on devices for
everyday use: mobile phones, laptops, and single-board computers usable
as desktop computers or as home servers, some of which I own and can
therefore demonstrate live in the talk, and can speak of from my own
experience.
Devices
I plan to talk about: Pinephone, Pinebook Pro, SOPINE A64 (from
Pine64); Librem5 phone and Librem laptops (from Purism); Odroid-XU4,
Odroid-H2+, Odroid Home Cloud devices (from HardKernel); Raspberry Pi 4;
and possibly the MNT Reform laptop and GNUBee PC-1.
Also, if you have some favorite privacy respecting or open hardware you would like to demonstrate or show off,
you're welcome to join in at the meeting and do a brief lightning talk
about it, especially if you have it at hand for show'n'tell.
We look forward to seeing you at the online meeting!
Details