Purism Still Working On Librem 5 Developer Kits, Delayed To December

[pemartins]

The Apollo program didn't shoot for the moon with the first flight, the had multiple unmanned flights, a manned earth orbital flight, a flight around the moon and only then went for an actual moon landing mission.

Ouch, I hope this analogy of the moon landing with the Librem phone doesn't end up related, otherwise all we'll be getting from Purism is a movie made in a studio set of a phone... and no phone at all!

Nowadays in marketing terms I believe to be an error perfecting a product to release it (yeah I know, I hate what I wrote too) because most probably when the product is released the market has moved on and does not need the product anymore, but relating to the Purism phone I agree that they should postpone the release until they have a good fully functioning product AND they can run sandboxed Android apps on it (the Anbox project). Otherwise it will just be something that commercially will not make sense because apps is what the clients want and need. And good cameras for the videos and the selfies, of course.
I understand the Librem to be a niche product, but at its price the basic to demand is that it does what other phones (and way cheaper...) can do.

[Serafean]

Let's not even go into what they could do for the actual production device with more resources to spend on making it better...

Maybe I'm too focused on actually being able to deliver something working, but I personally try to built upward towards something great rather than trying to go fully featured from the get-go. The Apollo program didn't shoot for the moon with the first flight, the had multiple unmanned flights, a manned earth orbital flight, a flight around the moon and only then went for an actual moon landing mission.

Yeah, but with Apollo, they were learning. To continue the analogy, in this case there already are competitors that go to the moon, the possibility of surviving while going through this iterative process where half your products explode isn't an economically viable solution.

This also brings me to the marketing part of this: The libre world can't afford another openmoko/firefoxOS. They need to deliver 95% good on their promise on the first try, otherwise the "plebs" and reviewers will tear it to shreds as another example of how Libre products will always suck.
This is a niche product, with a lot of visibility. I'd say the rules are a bit different.

Linguistic intermission: it is not "per say", but "per se".

[Azrael5]

That's the "SoM" or "System on Module" part, it's a Emcraft i.MX 8M.
Emcraft does the "Module", i. e. a small daughterboard containing the CPU, RAM and other stuff.
The used SoC on the SoM is a NXP i.MX 8M which has 4 ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit Cores, and a 2 Core Vivante GC7000 Lite GPU.

Since they can't really use a SoM in a phone, only the devboard will contain the Emcraft board, the phone itself must use the pure NXP SoC.

many thanks

[blackiwid]

AND they can run sandboxed Android apps on it (the Anbox project). Otherwise it will just be something that commercially will not make sense because apps is what the clients want and need. And good cameras for the videos and the selfies, of course.
I understand the Librem to be a niche product, but at its price the basic to demand is that it does what other phones (and way cheaper...) can do.

I beg to differ, look at the Jolla Systems, they sold well and people wanted their tablets, the problem was not their shitty android support, people even ignored that they release a proprietary OS, because most are so sick of Android and that slow ram wasting java garbage.

They failed only because they could not deliver and misscalculations people ripped their hardware out of their hands. The Tablet was very very highly requested.

And librem has all the privacy and libre advantages on top of them, and they work better together with upstream.
I don't even see librem phone primary as a hardware project that is primary the first plattform for their software.

They don't need or will be able to sell billions of devices anyway because for that the hardware per buck is way to bad, and the normal person maybe cares a bit about privacy and freedom if we are lucky but will not pay 1 dollar extra for it.

So with that charge they will not be the target anyway. If you are a free software guy you are willing by definition to loose some functionality in favor of freedom.

The comparisons to all the other projects are bad, it was a different time and they all failed mostly for different reasons it seldom had to do with market demand or android support.

Openmoko failed because Microsoft bribed Nokia or a stupid manager without bribing made the wrong decision, had nothing to do with no android support, and because the system just sucked the base os was so garbage that it was not competitive at least at that point with android.

And back then it was much more expensive to create such a device (but nokia could have done it).

Mozilla OS targeted the opposite end of the market the low cost market pushing for webapps, which requires websites to coorporate except they of course give a shit and to develop a webapp is much much more time taking than develop a native app, sure you can argue that that also works for other oses, but still the initial time to do it is higher and it can't be really done by a 3rd party, the gatekeeper of the website has to do it.

And they had no real vision all this projects just focused on the "linux" part, while Linux the kernel is not important, freedom (and privacy with it) is important and can make the difference.

Just another proprietary OS like Android that just don't come from Google and has a linux kernel is worthless.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

Openmoko failed because Microsoft bribed Nokia or a stupid manager without bribing made the wrong decision, had nothing to do with no android support, and because the system just sucked the base os was so garbage that it was not competitive at least at that point with android.

Do you mean N900 and N9? Those where the Nokia products and they where brilliant. But then Microsoft planted their trojan CEO Elop and he canceled the project in favor of Windows phones. A big part of the team that had developed this project at Nokia left the company and founded Jolla, so that is basically the spiritual successor of those phones.

The OpenMoko sorry is a completely different one. They basically created a almost complete open source phone and there was a very active community developing stuff for it. The hardware was quite old, but they had a lot of interest from the free sofware community. With their second version, the Freerunner they sold a lot from the start as all the tech geeks where hungry for their new device, but for everyone with at least some sense it was clear that this wasn't a consumer product. But they went all in and produced a huge stack of phones at the same moment the demand crashed completely down because all the users they had where early adopters. This was basically their financial ruin.

There are various reasons why those projects failed. Ubuntu touch from Canonical failed because they had some seriously over the top expectations about beating Apple and Google... But it luckily survives as a community project called UBports with sane people that do the completely right thing and just try to make a good operating system they enjoy using instead of world domination.

I think most people completely lose perspective when it comes to mobile phones. You don't need to take on Google and Apple to create a great phone that is worth using. Think about this like the Linux desktop. It has a seriously small market share, but in my opinion, the experience, amount of choice and flexibility is so much better than what Mac and Windows offers, and we get that all without being the dominant system in the market. And I think it is because the solutions come from the community. Our motivation is to have a nice system we like to use, exactly what the UBports guys do.

And about apps, fuck apps, I don't need a store full of garbage with malware and ads. I want a curated software repository that has some standards like the one I have on my Linux Desktop.

[blackiwid]

I think most people completely lose perspective when it comes to mobile phones.

You have a bit more incite in that topic, but I think we have pretty much the same opinion, my point was that app support was not why this other projects at least partially failed. So no delaying Librem for proper android app support makes not much sense.

[Azrael5]

That's the "SoM" or "System on Module" part, it's a Emcraft i.MX 8M.
Emcraft does the "Module", i. e. a small daughterboard containing the CPU, RAM and other stuff.
The used SoC on the SoM is a NXP i.MX 8M which has 4 ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit Cores, and a 2 Core Vivante GC7000 Lite GPU.

Since they can't really use a SoM in a phone, only the devboard will contain the Emcraft board, the phone itself must use the pure NXP SoC.

It should be a good CPU. The GPU is a bit mediocre.

[pemartins]

blackiwid and ZeroPointEnergy I understand your points of view but I believe that, by quoting somehow similar projects, that you already set the faith of the Librem. Unfortunately it seems that the path is similar.
No apps means dumb phone. There is a small market for that, but to compete on it the Librem had to cost 30 usd tops. And it's too big, it had to be substantially smaller.

Referring that the Librem equals freedom I believe it to be an utopia, there is no freedom at all because you have nothing to choose from. I believe it to be the opposite, you have nothing but scarcity and limitations. Yes I can put there whatever I please, but... what will I put there if there is nothing or barely nothing available for me to put in there?

The privacy feature... I cannot stop thinking about the Blackphone. That was the pinnacle of privacy, it had Android, it had bullet proof security, it had lots of advertisement, it was 'the perfect phone for criminals' ... but if failed big time. Nowadays it still seems that there is not enough market share that cares about privacy.

And we have to remember that being a niche market product with, let's say, a market with a million clients, it does not mean that it will sell a million phones. Far from that, it only means that there are a million clients that would ever buy the product. And of that million the Librem will get a little share that will be bigger or smaller according to what it advertises, to what it brings and to how the market accepts it.

[blackiwid]

And we have to remember that being a niche market product with, let's say, a market with a million clients, it does not mean that it will sell a million phones. Far from that, it only means that there are a million clients that would ever buy the product. And of that million the Librem will get a little share that will be bigger or smaller according to what it advertises, to what it brings and to how the market accepts it.

"Success" is a very relative term, for you it would be a success if it would be more or less a 1:1 clone of android with a bit other UI and had 100mio sold devices. For me that would be the opposite of success.

For me it has to put forward freedom and then 50.000 Sold devices and staying alive and maintaining the software would be a success even I am to poor or not interested enough at that point to invest much money into phones.

The hardware is not that important, I will get probably something like rpi-phone or this psion phone down the line. But of course if I would have much money I would buy that phone.

It's kind of nice to have 50% market share on the desktop as example, but you don't have to have it, to be fine as linux is, and it has a price all this horrible coorporation bastardise linux and fill it with adware and shit...

But again better a failure with a good product than success with a product that has absolute no advantage like what you want.

You sound like Chris Fisher, who wanted a high quality Apple pc with linux preinstalled and then be pissed that the "librem" company removed the proprietary nvidia garbage out of the thing, because he bought from a company with the name Librem but not carying about libre.

And freedom is not only freedom of choice, but of course you have choice you can choose between kde and gnome and probably 5 other des thats 100% more than what you can choose in android.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

No apps means dumb phone.

No actually it doesn't. If you have a good browser you will be able to do 90% of the things you can think of already. And don't forget that Android is open source and there are already multiple efforts underway to make those apps run under GNU/Linux in a container.

Besides that, upstream kernel support means this is a lot more than a normal smartphone. Have you ever worked with Android devices? It's completely horrible, every device tree (the android system) and the kernel are forks for every device with custom patches on top. They are not up-gradable, not maintainable and use userspace non-GPL firmware for the drivers which makes it simply hell to work with as a user who wants control over the device.

The librem is indeed something different than a smartphone. It is a general purpose computing device with the form factor and the hardware of a smartphone. There are so much more possibilities and I can't wait to get my hands on the devkit!