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Comment by volta83 | Hacker News Reader

> System76 & the LVFS > [...] > Later on the LVFS team put in work to support the use case of System76 so that vendors could use the LVFS without any sort of reporting. > https://archive.is/mH4dO

The goal of the author here is to show how bad System76 behaved. But after reading this, clicking the links, and reading the PR that actually got implemented (link above) my take is that System76 had to fight for years to get an option added to fwupd, to avoid their users from getting tracked when downloading system76 firmware through the tool.

That... doesn't sound like evil to me? I didn't knew that fwupd collects statistics about which firmwares my laptops download, from where, when, etc. and sends them to the hardware vendors. Is there a way for users to disable this tracking for all firmwares from all vendors?

If anything, this actually makes me want to get a System76 laptop.

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> I didn't knew that fwupd collects statistics about which firmwares my laptops download, from where, when, etc.

That's the most alarmist way I've ever seen of referring to an HTTP access log.

> my take is that System76 had to fight for years to get an option added to fwupd, to avoid their users from getting tracked when downloading system76 firmware through the tool.

Well, no. They didn't 'fight' for that, they complained about it. For a while they decided that LVFS wasn't a right fit and went with their own tool and infrastructure[0].

To quote:

" I then got told that I’d made the LVFS and fwupd more complicated than it needed to be, and that I should have adopted the infrastructure that System76 had built instead. This was all without them actually logging into the LVFS and seeing what features were available or what constraints were being handled." [1]

But they didn't 'fight' for it. Richard Hughes fought for it. And even more than that; he implemented it, which is what counts.

> That... doesn't sound like evil to me?

Well, no. Spreading FUD on the other hand could be considered - if not evil - then at least somewhat mean[2]

> If anything, this actually makes me want to get a System76 laptop.

That's awesome. We need more people buying custom Linux hardware. The more, the merrier, the lower the costs, the better the support.

[0] https://archive.md/VPvhu

[1] https://archive.md/A4ZMS

[2] https://archive.md/UgGxn

> Well, no. They didn't 'fight' for that, they complained about it. For a while they decided that LVFS wasn't a right fit and went with their own tool and infrastructure[0].

So why is this a problem ?

If LVFS isn't a right fit, cause its missing a feature, and they prefer to roll their own system instead of submitting a 100 LOC patch, that's kind of up to them ?

> So why is this a problem ?

It's not a problem at all. It just demonstrates that they didn't "fight" for the feature. Not using a service that's offered to you gratis is not a problem at all.

Spreading FUD and slandering fellow programmers might be a problem.

> that's kind of up to them ?

It absolutely is. But they still didn't fight for that. Richard Hughes fought for it.

Thanks for clarifying.

I enjoyed your post, and the other issues mentioned were easier to follow and understand what you mean.

I'm sorry that this happened.

No worries!

Communication is hard. We misunderstand each other, even if we talk face to face. Text is even harder to parse and it's way easier to make mistakes, both when sending as well as receiving.

Thanks for your kindness and understanding!

So, after reading that exchange, I was left with a question. Richard Hughes:

> The way forward from my point of view would be for System76 to spend a few hours making UpdateCapsule work correctly

System76:

> UpdateCapsule is not supported by over a decade of machines in the field and could not be added without a firmware update.

> [UpdateCapsule] does not allow the reverse engineering and open-sourcing of firmware update components.

This sounds like there are technical reasons not to use UpdateCapsule, unrelated to the whole LVFS thing?

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