A GNU/Linux Smartphone Running GNOME & HTML5 Web Apps? Priced At $599, Ships In 2019 If The Stars Align

[Michael_S]

Jolla did the same and they successed they live. And look as example to the garbage fair phone 1, they have extremly small profit rate per mobile. They sold 100.000 that seems to be enough to keep them in business.

2% Linux users worldwide by 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year would be 300mio users. Even if only 1% of the linux users buy that phone its 3mio devices. Heck even if onely 0.1% linux users buy that device its 300.000 Devices.

If they make 100 dollar with each device before you calculate coding in they have a budget of 30mio for coding.

Jolla built on top of Meego. Admittedly that is an option I hadn't considered. On the other hand, I think your math is wrong. 1.5 billion smartphones might be sold per year, but 2% of 1.5 billion is 30 million, not 300 million. So your 1% of Linux users would be 300,000 and your 0.1% would be 30,000.

And half of the work the community will do them for free cause many of the features are needed in that upstream projects eventualy, like good touch support etc in gnome. Also most features a phone can do gnome/gkt apps can do already, you just need different guis thats all.

There is nothing stopping the free work now. The free software community could have forked Meego, or Ubuntu Touch, or Firefox OS and made something. It didn't happen. Why would Purism be different?

Also the argument mozilla or ubuntu, is a bad argument that are more or less big coorporations. They need a big scale to do stuff. if they dont earn 100 trilion of a business they concentrate on others. Its not always enough to make profit with something, if you can make MORE profit with something else companies kill projects.

Also in big companies development is more expensive, they pay developer higher vages and processes are slower and therefor more expensive. If Jolla with a propriatary fake GNU/Linux can survive and fairphone with a hard locked android 4.3 scam phone. Why should librem not be able to do it?

Fair points. (Technically Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation and not a corporation, but your points still stand.) But I don't think Mozilla and Canonical stopped because the projects were not profitable enough. They stopped because the projects were dead, period. They couldn't get enough customer interest for it to matter.

And for a large development team, a lot of slowness is essential because you need a ton of investment in quality and automated testing.

On top of that Canonical startet a war against the linux community, so people boycotted or fought them on patches upstream etc.

Canonical had tons of enemies in the Linux community, but they also had tons of supporters. So even if 70% (I'm making that number up, it's besides the point) of the Linux community wasn't interested in Ubuntu Touch, they still had enough interest that the project could have succeeded. It still failed.

Also they proofed already that they can deliver, it went not perfekt but they even delivered on a coreboot without antifeatures, which I would not thought it would be doable, they did it. With extreme messures but thats a good thing they are serious about it. They are not the usual marketing scam, "eventualy we will opensource it" (...in 10000 years maybe)

So when they successed once (not all customers were happy but many were), I will not doubt that they do it again. And if its ruff so be it there are hundret tousends of developers heck millions out there, that will prioratise hackability / freedom higher than polish.

There aren't a million free software developers out there. If there were, this problem would have been solved long ago.

[pmorph]

Interesting to see how many will actually be taking the risk with this.
Back when I acquired the Jolla phone, I did it regardless it being more likely to fail than succeed, because the project looked interesting and in $300 range the price wasn't totally unbearable. But with double the price? No way.

[AndyChow]

External modem (in the sense that it isn't inside the same SoC), like one of these https://nimbelink.com/skywire-4g-lte-cat-1/

Regardless, wouldn't they also be required to pay Qualcomm to be able to access the US frequencies, even not using their chips? If Apple has to pay higher royalties when it doesn't use Qualcomm chips than when it does, to access those frequencies, I don't know why it would be different here.

All I'm saying is, don't expect this to run on 4G/LTE in north america. Cause they never do.

[blackiwid]

Plain Linux like Debian or Arch with Wayland and QT/GTK would be fine if I was going to use my three year old smartphone as a Raspberry Pi 3 without the GPIO ports. I could plug it into a monitor, use 802.11n networking and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and play around with it in fun ways. But pure Linux applications for using it just as a mobile phone? You would need dozens of full time developers working for years to get it right. And you would need to reinvent a lot of the features that Android already has.

Jolla did the same and they successed they live. And look as example to the garbage fair phone 1, they have extremly small profit rate per mobile. They sold 100.000 that seems to be enough to keep them in business.

2% Linux users worldwide by 1.5 billion smartphones sold each year would be 300mio users. Even if only 1% of the linux users buy that phone its 3mio devices. Heck even if onely 0.1% linux users buy that device its 300.000 Devices.

If they make 100 dollar with each device before you calculate coding in they have a budget of 30mio for coding.

And half of the work the community will do them for free cause many of the features are needed in that upstream projects eventualy, like good touch support etc in gnome. Also most features a phone can do gnome/gkt apps can do already, you just need different guis thats all.

Also the argument mozilla or ubuntu, is a bad argument that are more or less big coorporations. They need a big scale to do stuff. if they dont earn 100 trilion of a business they concentrate on others. Its not always enough to make profit with something, if you can make MORE profit with something else companies kill projects.

Also in big companies development is more expensive, they pay developer higher vages and processes are slower and therefor more expensive. If Jolla with a propriatary fake GNU/Linux can survive and fairphone with a hard locked android 4.3 scam phone. Why should librem not be able to do it?

On top of that Canonical startet a war against the linux community, so people boycotted or fought them on patches upstream etc.

Also they proofed already that they can deliver, it went not perfekt but they even delivered on a coreboot without antifeatures, which I would not thought it would be doable, they did it. With extreme messures but thats a good thing they are serious about it. They are not the usual marketing scam, "eventualy we will opensource it" (...in 10000 years maybe)

So when they successed once (not all customers were happy but many were), I will not doubt that they do it again. And if its ruff so be it there are hundret tousends of developers heck millions out there, that will prioratise hackability / freedom higher than polish.

[L_A_G]

Article title: "Crowdfunding sees their first slowdown in 5 years"

your conclusion "crowdfunding is done for".

I mean, maybe there are other factors at play too in that slight decrease?

Did you also notice they were talking also of "equity crowdfunding" which is NOT what kickstarter and friends do?

Your dyslexic reading continues to be as disappointing as ever... I never said that crowndfunding is "done for", just that a number of big failures have lead to less enthusiasm dying out somewhat and big successes like this needs to be have become way less common than what they used to. If you look a the top kickstarter projects you'll see that 2014 and 2015 were the by far biggest years in terms of big crowdfunding campaigns. Out of the top 15 spots 6, including the #1 spot, were 2015 campaigns and if you add in earlier campaigns 11 out of the to 15 are 2015 and earlier campaigns. The highest 2017 gets on there is #3 and 2017 #4.

Also, try to read that properly because it talks crowdfunding in general, which includes equity crowdfunding.

[Michael_S]

Read some more about Mer and libhybris. Hybris effectively allows you to use existing Android drivers on existing Android devices to run normal Linux. It's pretty damn smart, and a decent platform to built on unless you have a vendor who's 100% on-board with open Linux drivers for everything. It runs on a number of devices as well, and quite well.

Regarding Replicant- it's still Android. All of UI is Android, and app engine is also Android. I'd rather have normal Linux ecosystem with Wayland and QT (or GTK) apps. Pretty close to what Sailfish does, but their UI is still closed-source. And not too many native apps, and it could use more features & polish. Otherwise you'd rather run Replicant- no reason to develop own OS...

I don't love Android. But I think the amount of work required to build a usable non-Android, Linux-based smart phone operating system is enormous. Again, Canonical and Mozilla put more time and far more money than this into it and still couldn't gain traction in the market. You need:

- A dialer.
- A camera application.
- An SMS system.
- A navigation application of some kind.
- Some sort of facility in the operating system to transparently manage all of them, so that a notification from your GPS navigation won't disconnect your phone call or an especially Javascript-heavy web page doesn't delay the "turn left" instruction from your navigation software until after you missed the turn.
- Some sort of facility in the operating system to prevent your applications from sucking the battery dry.
- Some mechanism like Android and iOS have to transparently pause or kill background applications to save on memory usage and battery life.

So I think until someone or some group invests ten years and a few billion into a project like this, the closest thing the world has to a practical path forward for a FLOSS smart phone operating system is Replicant. That's still not very practical, even Replicant is years and millions of dollars away from having all of the FLOSS drivers they need. But it's the best option we have.

Plain Linux like Debian or Arch with Wayland and QT/GTK would be fine if I was going to use my three year old smartphone as a Raspberry Pi 3 without the GPIO ports. I could plug it into a monitor, use 802.11n networking and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and play around with it in fun ways. But pure Linux applications for using it just as a mobile phone? You would need dozens of full time developers working for years to get it right. And you would need to reinvent a lot of the features that Android already has.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

So much stupid in one thread, almost unbelievable

They are completely on the right track. This is exactly what is needed, a free mobile computing device with all the drivers mainlined. This will for the first time create a basis for a real free phone.

Canonical tried something completely different. Maybe some of their work can be salvaged and reused on this free platform though.

[blackiwid]

android is enough for that

yes just don't install google apps and f-droid instead and you are fine, too. For fucks sake even sailfish-os has not buildin webcal and webcard support.

[pal666]

For privacy and encryption.

android is enough for that

[pal666]

Sorry, I think you misunderstand. Libhybris is not about running Android apps. Libhybris is about running Android DRIVERS and being able to run real Linux on Android devices easily with next to no vendor support.

i understand it perfectly, but in my book real linux includes real linux drivers

Believe me, having a real Linux ecosystem underneath makes a LOT of difference for me. Being able to freely use native rsync, ssh, systemd, Midnight Commander, rpm (although I'd prefer dpkg) only serves to remind me how much I miss it when I have to use Android.

i heard you can install ubuntu chroot on android

Did you mention you want a phone with a real Fedora? Which aspects of Fedora do you need? Because if you need RPM and ability to install stuff, you might want to try Mer/SailfishOS. The only thing it lacks is real X- the UI is based on Wayland/QT. You could try getting xwayland running, but I haven't played around with that.

i need fedora because i use fedora on computers. so why have another distro on phone