Category: Events

Conferences, tradeshows, and other gatherings we participate in

An overview of this summer’s community conferences

This summer, we have been kept busy with a number of things. As you can see with the many blog posts from the Librem 5 phone development team (many more are scheduled to be published in the coming days and weeks), we have been heavily focused on preparing the software platform for the phone, as well as designing the hardware to be manufactured for the development kits and the components that will be used for the production phone.

However, our work does not happen in isolation, hence why many of us attend FLOSS conferences as part of our collaborative development model. Whenever and wherever possible, we aim to supplement our attendance with sponsorship of those important Free Software events.

  • The GUADEC 2018 conference attendees

    Some of you might already have met multiple Librem 5 developers who attended GUADEC at the beginning of the month, where we sponsored a coffee break to offset some of the costs of organizing the conference.

  • This week, our PureOS developers are attending the Debian conference, starting with “Debcamp” this week and then the core conference days this upcoming week. Like GUADEC, we are also supporting debconf by sponsoring the event in addition to sending team members there. You can see Zlatan, Jonas, Matthias and Chris Lamb roaming the venue, so make sure to say hi to them!
  • Shortly after debconf, some of us will be attending Akademy 2018, the KDE conference, which we are sponsoring at the bronze level.

Those are the essential conferences we’re attending this summer season. While we are careful with our travel and sponsorships this year with the significant investments that our R&D efforts require, we hope to continue to support such events close to our technological stack and communities, and to broaden our presence in the future.

Purism at FestiĞ1 and the Librem as a Digital Hardware Wallet

Two weeks ago, I attended an event in Toulouse, France, where I was kindly invited by the organizers, who offered me a booth to present Purism and the Librem line.

Purism, utilizing a hardware security element in our Librem Laptops as well as our upcoming Librem 5 phone will be addressing the serious issue of securing crypto-currencies in hardware wallets with secure offline backups. Read more

Upcoming March 2018 events: LibrePlanet, Reddit AMA

Ask us anything at LibrePlanet 2018

We are proud to announce that we will be attending and sponsoring the Free Software Foundation’s flagship conference, LibrePlanet, at the MIT this week-end on March 24-25th.

We will also be manning a booth there, where you can try out our Librem laptops and see one of our i.MX 6 phone prototype development boards for the Librem 5. Come and say hi! We’ll be happy to meet old friends and new Free Software enthusiasts, veterans and newcomers, and to answer any questions attendees may have for us.

Ask Todd Anything online

Todd Weaver, founder and CEO of Purism, will be doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on March 28th at 17h00 UTC (10h00 PDT / 13h00 EDT). You can already see him scheduled in the sidebar on the right of https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/. In true Reddit tradition, he is using the picture below to authenticate into Reddit:

The “proof” that Reddit requires

Meet us at FOSDEM 2018!

Are you attending FOSDEM next week-end? So are we! Join us in this massive Free Software event in Brussels on February 3rd and 4th and ask us anything!

Members of the Purism design team, Librem 5 development team, and PureOS developers will be meeting up and walking around the event, namely: François, Predrag (Peter), Jeff, Nicole, Dorota, Guido, Adrien, Matthias and Zlatan will all be on-site. You can check out what they look like on our team page. Come and say hi!

Jeff and François will be dedicated to answering your questions (in English or French!) and will be walking around the venue wearing clearly identifiable polo shirts, like this:

They will also be carrying our all new information booklet summarizing our approaches to security, freedom, and the goals behind our products such as the Librem 5. Feel free to take one!

Purism Attends Chaos Communication Congress

Chaos Computer Club hosts the CCC

We are attending the Chaos Communication Congress between December 27th – 30th in Leipzig, Germany. This is one of the largest gatherings of people who are interested in computer security, cryptography, privacy, and free speech in the world.

Two of our staff will be attending the event. Youness Alaoui and Zlatan Todoric hope to connect with those going or who are interested in learning more about the Congress. Please contact them on #Purism IRC channel on Freenode. Zlatan’s handle is zlatan, and Youness’ handle is KaKaRoTo.

They can’t wait to meet you at the Chaos Communication Congress!

Le Capitole du Libre 2017


Artwork by David Revoy

A great weekend.

A few days ago, I was at Le Capitole du Libre which is one of the main free software events in France. The event was a real success for everyone involved. There were more people than last year, the organization was amazing and I had a very good time with some very nice people.

There were many interesting talks and workshops ranging from purely technical to more philosophical and political subjects like “The Current State of Free Software in our Society”, which was the closing day debate on Saturday evening. It involved great names from the French free software community. As you can see from the picture, the talk was accessible to the deaf and so the event had a few sign language translators present. Big thumbs up for that!

Jonas, from the Purism team, joined me to give a talk as part of MiniDebConf (an event within an event).
As for myself, I was representing Purism with a booth that was showing the Librem 13 and Librem 15 as well as promoting the upcoming Librem 5.

Representing Purism.

There was a lot of interest for the Purism booth and a lot of excitement for the Librem 5. Over the 2 day event I hadn’t stopped answering questions about our products and philosophy.

One of the most recurring topics was about the availability of a French keyboard layout and the availability of the Librem laptops in Europe, especially in France.

This issue is slowly making progress as we currently have a reseller in Germany who is at this time not able to deliver outside of Germany. Regarding the reseller, I want to clarify that I may have given some people the impression that their prices were the same as in the USA, but this is not the case. I didn’t have those prices with me at the time of the event, and the prices in Euros are indeed including the German VAT. I am sorry about the confusion.

We are still in the process of finding a reseller who would deliver to France and other European countries and I suspect the French keyboard layout will happen concurrently with that. Hopefully, these changes will happen some time in 2018 as the Laptop sales and the demand in Europe keep growing.

Anyway, as I mentioned during the event please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us through our forum or by email if you have any questions or feedback.

Thank you everyone. I had a great time. See you next year! 🙂

Meet the development team at the 2017 Debian Conference

We are proud to announce that we will be sponsoring and attending the 2017 Debian conference from August 1st to August 12 in Montréal, Canada. As PureOS is a derivative of Debian and various members of the team come from the Debian community, it is with great pleasure that we will support this event.

Many Purism team members will be present, including Zlatan Todorić (our CTO and an official Debian developer) with Matthias “Ximion” Klumpp, Jonas Smedegaard (Debian Developer) and Chris Lamb (current Debian Project Leader) for the full duration of the event, including the workshops (“Debcamp”) and core conference days.

Purism CEO Todd Weaver will also be attending from August 4th to August 8th.

On the “Open Day” on Saturday August 5th, we will be showcasing a couple of our newest Librem production models and prototypes.

Participation in the Debian conference and “open day” is free and no registration is required. Come and say hi! See the important dates for more information.

Jeff will also be available in the days before and after the event, to handle any logistics needs, or to answer any business or press inquiries. Should you want to meet before or after the event, please get in touch with us at pr@puri.sm.

Celebrate GNOME’s 20th anniversary with us at GUADEC 2017

We are proud to announce that we will be attending the GNOME flagship conference, GUADEC, from July 28th to 30th, and co-sponsoring GNOME’s 20th anniversary celebration event at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry on Saturday the 29th.

The local GUADEC organizers make a beautiful parallel between the local heritage of Manchester and the bleeding edge technology we are all developing:

“We’ll be planning the future of computing in the same city where some early breakthroughs in computing were made. The world’s first stored-program computer was developed at the University of Manchester in the late 1940s and the Museum has a working replica in the Revolution Hall where we’ll be holding the event, along with other amazing exhibits from the city’s industrial legacy.” — GUADEC 2017 organizers

We’re happy to be contributing to the party event on Saturday—where there will be food, lively discussions, and much rejoicing!

You will also be able to see a couple of our newest Librem production models and prototypes on display there—not that they “belong in a museum”,  but we do think they are interesting enough to be exhibited in a venue that honors science and industry.

During the rest of the conference’s core days, we (Jeff, Matthias, François, Todd) will be roaming around the Manchester Metropolitan University’s “Brooks” building to discuss topics of interest with fellow contributors and old friends. We’re particularly interested in:

  • Mobile and touch graphical user interfaces and input handling (including multitouch, gestures, etc.)
  • Power optimization (for laptops, tablets and phones)
  • Sandboxing, privacy and security in general
  • OEM desktop environment, applications and contents customizability
  • Extensions robustness
  • Graphics performance
  • Apps and Package robustness and user experience
  • Firmware updates management

Purism advisory board member Matthew Garrett will also be attending.

Come and say hi! We’ll be happy to meet GNOME enthusiasts—whether veterans or newcomers—and to answer any questions attendees may have for us.

Bringing Librem 13 v2 and Librem 15 v3 prototypes back from LibrePlanet for further coreboot porting work

A few days ago we gave you a very quick sneak peek of the Librem 15 v3’s anodized black finish as we were doing final preparations for our LibrePlanet 2017 attendance. We were very happy to support the Free Software Foundation by sponsoring LibrePlanet! On Saturday morning, we started setting up our booth slowly, thinking there would not be much activity going on at the beginning of the day. We were proved wrong:

There was a crowd around our booth at pretty much all times (except lunchtime) throughout the day Saturday, during which it was revealed that Todd is possibly a cyborg, as he stood there answering questions for eight hours straight, without needing to eat, drink, or sit:

Great discussions were had. James was also present, attending talks and officially winning our photobomber of the year award, as you can see him in the lower-right corner of this photo:

New passions bloomed among attendees:

People who saw and touched the Librems found them to be quite impressive. For instance:

Some of the frequent comments we heard were “Wow. They’re even better than on the photos!”, “When can I buy one?” and “I was a Purism skeptic, but I see you are delivering on your promises and making the impossible possible.”

Really encouraging!

Upcoming coreboot work

While we were hard at work answering thousands of questions at LibrePlanet, our coreboot developer Youness was on vacation while waiting for some more testing hardware. This week he will be resuming his work on preparing/packaging coreboot for release, and with the two new prototype units I brought back from Boston he will also be able to begin the coreboot port for these devices. We hope to do that in time to factory-flash them for the next batch of deliveries in May-June, but we’ll see how the development work pans out. If it’s not ready within that short timespan, we will provide coreboot as an update that you can flash yourself.

Youness has also made some additional progress on the Intel ME, thanks to information and data that Igor Skochinsky was able to share with us. Stay tuned for Youness’ next report!

Getting ready for LibrePlanet and the new Librem 15 v3

This year, we’re attending and sponsoring LibrePlanet, which is being held this week-end in Boston. Todd and I arrived one day early, as we wanted to seize the opportunity to spend a full day coworking to align our plans (regarding communications, product design and supply chain management), confirm product specifications, and test some new prototypes we have on hand. Todd recently (yesterday!) received sample parts and prototype units from suppliers, so we spent some time checking the aesthetic and functional aspect of the next revision of the Librem 13 (v2) and Librem 15 (v3), including the chips, killswitches, and removable components.

I also brought with me some older units I had gathered from others, including the Librem 11 prototype (which we bricked during testing) and the previous revision of the Librem 15.

Oh, “But what is that mysterious black plate in the center of the table”, you ask? Well, that’s one of the sample parts our suppliers sent us: the upper aluminium plate of the upcoming Librem 15 v3, which will be anodized black like our lovely Librem 13.

Here you can see Todd’s Librem 13 on the left (which looks brand new even after 2 years of intensive use) and the Librem 15 v3’s anodized aluminium extrusion sample on the right (resting on top of the old Librem 15 production model for comparison).

We chose a matte finish to avoid fingerprints from showing up (disclaimer: if you’re worried about someone lifting your invisible fingerprints from your laptop, you probably want to type with gloves like this guy–except you’ll be way cooler, because you’ll be using a Librem instead of some old plastic junk 😉

We’re still finalizing details when it comes to the final specs, but from the looks of it, those with outstanding orders may benefit from a free upgrade to a newer generation of CPU and graphic chipsets, in addition to the black aluminium chassis.

Today we have placed a batch order through our supply chain for the Librem 15 v3, so we hope to provide you with an update on specifications and estimates soon. In the meantime, if any of you are attending LibrePlanet, we look forward to meeting you this week-end!