With projects like Gobuntu and gNewSense aiming to provide a platform that is zealous about free software, the obvious question is “where can I run it?”. And right now, as far as laptops go, there are no good answers. Pretty much any laptop you can buy today needs some sort of non-free bits to make the most of its hardware, putting you in the tricky position of having to choose between hardware usefulness and software freedom. And boy, do we know about that choice in Ubuntu!

There have been several threads about this, in comments on this blog and also on comments to Bug #1. Most of them have focused on free drivers but we should also be thinking about OpenBIOS (the new name for the LinuxBIOS project). An ideal solution would also use firmware that has a free software licence as well, but I personally would see OpenBIOS and free drivers as a good start.

Read more at Mark Shuttleworth blog