Purism Announces Librem Server While Also Announcing Price Hikes On The Librem 5

[theriddick]

IMO Librem5 should have just released a image that can install on phones like PinePhone etc for $50, would have made them allot more money.
But they seem to think their custom hardware is magical and wonderful. shrug.

[stiiixy]

Most of you are talking hindsight.

[slalomsk8er]

I get, that the CEO has the Steve Jobs syndrome and this rubbing people the wrong way. But still, don't you think Purism is leveraging synergies by selling the stuff they build for them self anyway? How much more does it cost in the cloud age to add a customer instance of a service after building and running testing and production for your own needs? How much do you think it will cost to add rebranded and preloaded servers to the lineup after selling rebranded and preloaded Laptops?

I would really like to see them pulling off a free as in freedom alternative to the Apple word.

[pemartins]

The Purism guys try to associate the Librem5 with words like freedom, privacy, Google and Apple alternative... but at this point all they have achieved, and with no turning back point, is to be associated with words like con, scam, ponzi and joke.

[Raka555]

I wonder when I will learn my lesson ...

I backed the DragonBox Pyra (https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/) in 2016. The thing is still not shipping and there are absolutely no urgency. Every update you have to hear how over worked and tired the guy is. I can appreciate that, but hell, 4 years !

Now I backed the Librem 5. I will get a 1/2 baked phone with a 1 hour battery life, sub par specs that can not make phones calls ... more than a year late...

Anyone knows a good psychiatrist ? I clearly need help.

[vladimir86]

That is fine. I can get a Pinephone for a fraction of the price. From the point where this is over £200 pounds I don't care if they charge 500 or 50000000. There is just no way I'll buy it, specially considering a standard battery life expectancy for a mobile phone. It's just not worth it!. Let posh people waste their money on this device, while I just get a functional mobile with Linux.

[mearon]

At this point I'm starting to lose trust in Purism. That price is ridiculous. I understand the price premium for something like the Fairphone (which is still "only" $450) and the somewhat high price for the Librem 5, but this is too much.
And I think Raptor Computing Systems have shown, if you want a fully modern FOSS server, get a POWER system.

+1
Exactly what I was thinking.

[DrYak]

But this is getting completely ridiculous given that Pine can produce a phone with similar benefits so much cheaper.

Pine has the big advantage of having started their phone much later, at a time point where there are now much more options regarding open-source supported hardware (such as their Allwinner + lima drivers). Whereas back a few years ago, back when Purism started, the ultra-crappy Freescale iMX8 + etnaviv was the only option.

They also only exclusively concentrate on the hardware and rely on their community to port actual OS : PostmarketOS, Sailfish OS, AOSP, Ubuntu Touch, LunaOS, etc. whereas Purism is running after way too many rabbits and trying to write their own OS at the same time too. Spreading thin over too much on their plate had the obvious expected consequence.

This is partly due to Pine having spent time to foster an active community from their SBC business, thus contributing to the existance of already viable open source-supported hardware by now, and having a community of devs ready to jump in with the OS.
They have incrementally designed starting from their SBC business, making much easier to tackle steps.

[DrYak]

Between russia funded closed hardware/software and crowd funded open hardware/software. Yea, sure it is.

Jolla hasn't produced any hardware themselves since the Jolla 1 phone and the ill-fated Jolla Tablet.
They rely on third party hardware to demonstrate their OS, mostly from Sony's opendevice program.

Software isn't funded by Russia either - Jolla Oy isn't directly financed by Russia. Aurora OS is a derivative of Sailfish OS that is mostly financed by Russia Telecom - it's a different distribution, and a different entity that is actually owned by Russian. Some of the efforts of Aurora OS are back-ported into upstream Sailfish OS by Jolla.
Aurora OS is also one of the solution considered by Huawei and currently tested for the tablets for the census. That won't make Jolla Oy chinese funded either.
Jolla mostly benefits from 3rd party dev time, and some licensing deals.
Actually, the "you can own your own local variant and be in charge of it" is a big part of the way Jolla markets Sailfish to governments.

Saying that Sailfish OS is Russia- (or China-) funded, would be similar to saying that Linux is Microsoft funded on the grounds that they ship a Linux-kernel derivative in WSL2 (and that their Azure is a large-scale linux deployment) and some of their contribution are back-ported upstream in mainline linux kernel.