Just how open source is Pine64 anyway?

[fire219]

Greetings all!



This post is mainly directed at the owners/operators/admins/mods/etc. of the entire Pine64 project, but I welcome community feedback as well.  The question is simple: Just how open source is Pine64 anyway?

Some context:
A friend of mine is absolutely in love with the concept of the Librem 5 phone, as well as pretty much everything else that organization does.  My understanding there is that that org has gone above and beyond the reaches of the entire bloody galaxy to open source their hardware and software.  As an example, not only is all of their Software FOSS, and not only do they provide datasheets (and I'm pretty sure schematics), but they've even collaborated with chip manufacturers to ensure components are FOSS-respecting, removed IME code from their intel CPUs (I think), written their own BIOS and UEFI bootloader, and I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that they replaced microcode on something somewhere.

But, as expected, this attention to minute detail comes at a cost, and their products are rather expensive.

So, Pine64 organization, I ask you: Just how open source is Pine64 anyway?  You've certainly avoided the issues of intel's IME by using a different chip on your products.  Do you, too, speak with your chip manufacturers?  Is it a non-issue because everything is an SOC which is itself FOSS?  Do you have any sort of custom super swanky bootloader?

I ask all of this, because the aforementioned friend also told me that he just didn't get a good vibe from you folks (several years ago when he first encountered you).  I have no such qualms (I encountered you much more recently), and he couldn't put his finger on what exactly he took issue with, but I'm mostly curious to see how you would respond to such an initial reaction.

Thank you all for your awesome work!

Most of the negative connotations people have with Pine64 is from the difficulties very early on where in the initial Kickstarter there was something like 50x the expected demand for the original Pine A64 boards.

Our products are as open as we've been able to make them on the razor-thin profit margins on the hardware, due to a large amount of work from several community developers. Almost everything is community driven.

At this point, most if not all of the boards(+laptops+Pinephone) can run almost completely libre. The issues in that regard are largely isolated to WiFi/BT driver blobs, and the initial stage 1 bootloader (which does DRAM initialization). You can use external WiFi/BT dongles to avoid the former, and some devs are working on coreboot and/or libreboot for the latter.