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> storing the firmware in a way that prevents the user from updating it via software

Nothing prevents the firmware being updated by the user on the Librem 5. The default kernel marks the SPI flash as read-only (mostly to prevent accidental soft-brick situations), but you can simply lift it up, or reflash it from the bootloader where there's no such restriction applied.

The firmware update is not intended to be done by the user - PureOS does not ever ask you to do that and it does not even provide the blobs in its repos; but if you want to update it for some reason, you're not prevented from doing so. You could always reflash the SPI flash with a hardware flasher (or even completely replace it) anyway, so it would be pointless to artificially prevent a motivated user from doing so in software. After all, they may be trying to use a free replacement that may show up in the future.



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