They write:

"Now imagine if you owned a computing device that you could easily fix yourself and inexpensively upgrade as needed. So, instead of having to shell out for a completely new computer, you could simply spend around US$50 to upgrade — which, by the way, you could easily do in SECONDS, by pushing a button on the side of your device and just popping in a new computer card. Doesn’t that sound like the way it should be?"

This project certainly sounds appealing, but only if the computer hardware is designed and configured to run software that does as much as possible to respect your freedom and ensure your control over your device. Fortunately, one option you have when backing this project is to purchase a Libre Tea Computer Card. After working closely with the developers and reviewing a sample test board, we are confident that their plans are to create a device that can achieve our Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification. And because the project is running their crowdfunding on Crowd Supply, users can financially support them anonymously and without the use of proprietary Javascript.

The project is being developed by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton of Rhombus-Tech and is sponsored by Christopher Waid of ThinkPenguin, a company that sells multiple RYF-certified hardware products. It is exciting to see passionate free software advocates in our community working with OEMs to produce a computer hardware product capable of achieving RYF certification. We hope that this is the first of many computing systems they are able to design and build that respect your freedom.

The Libre Tea Computer Card is built with an Allwinner A20 dual core processor configured to use the main CPU for graphics; it has 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of NAND Flash; and it will come pre-installed with Parabola GNU/Linux-libre, an FSF-endorsed fully-free operating system.

We encourage you to back the Libre Tea Computer Card. We'll have to do another evaluation once it is actually produced to be sure it meets our certification standards, but we have high hopes. Their funding deadline is August 26th, so don't delay!