Every time Purism is mentioned on HN there are always people chiming in with negativity around how it's not open or secure or free enough, based on some unachievable metric of those things and with an side dose of utopian fantasizing.
Buy one of these phones because you
- Want a 'free' phone to exist in the future
- Want an open source phone to exist in the future
- Want a secure phone to exist in the future
It may not be up to your standards now, but without your support (money) it will never exist.
If you have the money to spend, then spend it.
Consider it a donation to the cause.
Fully agree - there has been a lot of talk about an erosion of privacy, ads and consolidation in the tech sector. Viable alternatives will not emerge unless we fund them with individual purchasing decisions. We must remember that we are the invisible hand of Adam :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand]
Disclaimer: Views expressed are my own and do not have anything to do with my employer.
"Buy one of these phones because its a stepping stone to what you really want."
Part of the backlash against purism is that they market themselves as a fully libre platform when they are not. Many viewed that as trying to cash in on the desire for a truly libre laptop.
From their website
> Purism’s Librem products are the only modern high-end devices where you are in control and have complete visibility into the operating system, all bundled software, and the deeper levels of your computer.
Emphases added. This is false, or at best misleading. You don't have complete visibility into the Intel Management Engine. Only after their initial release have they managed to strip the ME down to a fraction of its original size, but its still there doing who knows what.
Purism started during a time when concerns behind management engines were gaining a lot of traction. They capitalized on those fears by marketing a laptop with "complete visibility" without actually delivering on that.
They are a step in the right direction, but they don't market themselves as that. It makes things harder for people like Raptor Computer Systems who actually deliver "completely visible" machines as from the marketing its easy to assume that their products are equally free/libre, so why pay extra for the Raptor products?
> If you have the money to spend, then spend it. Consider it a donation to the cause.
If you have money to spend, spend it on a Raptor machine that is _actually_ completely visible, or donate it to a reverse engineer working on libre drivers, or a hardware engineer working on libre designs.
I'm impressed and very much respectful of what the Purism folks are trying to achieve but I just don't think their business plan is viable as it is. As such I really don't really believe that getting a few geeks on HN to support the project will really make much of a difference. They need a much broader market share if they want to have a chance to survive in the long term and I don't see how they can get it. As it stands the only people who will consider buying this are principled FLOSS folks with a lot of disposable income. I doubt that's enough. It's not just about building the phone (which is already very difficult), it's also about maintaining the software and app ecosystem in the long term.
Windows Phones and countless other smartphone environments floundered over the years even though they were backed by behemoths. What chances does Purism have?
So while I have absolutely no hostility towards the project I just don't think it's worth donating money to what I consider to be a lost cause. I'd rather donate money to other Open Source projects who I think will make better use of it.
I would be very glad to be proven wrong however, the current smartphone ecosystem is an absolute nightmare if you value privacy and having control on your hardware. If it turns out that the Librem 5 is not dead on arrival like I presume it will be (assuming that it even manages to arrive in the first place) I'll definitely consider buying one.
The difference could be : a phone that you're not supposed to throw away after two years. Something that would be maintained over the long run. Lots of people would buy a phone that can last 5-7 years. I am one of them. My mother is one of them. My father too. Not everybody is fond enough of phones or tech to want to change often.
If it runs apps and has a good camera, it's fine.
A phone that lasts 5-7 years would also be good for the planet, and that's a bigger market share than FLOSS enthusiasts.
I agree with you on all counts but in order for the phone to be supported for a long time (both by Purism and by third parties) it needs to be reasonably successful. Otherwise nobody is going to even remember it existed two years from now, much less port and maintain apps for it.
That's my main problem really, I have Spotify, WhatsApp and a couple other closed-source applications on my smartphone that I need in order for said phone to be useful. If there are no ports or alternatives maintained on the Librem I'd just be buying a very expensive paperweight. And I don't think I'm a heavy app user compared to most of my friends who often have a couple social network apps, games etc...
Sibling comments mention that MS could probably make a profitable phone but they don't have the same objectives and I say that it's irrelevant. The problem is third parties and app supports. I need my phone to do more than calling and texting these days, I need decent driving directions, a multimedia player (ideally something that interfaces with Spotify, but I know that's asking for a lot), a chat application that can connect to WhatsApp (I won't convince all of my contacts to switch to Signal, Jabber or IRC) etc...
I need that stuff to be maintained and updated for at least a few years. And ideally after that I'd like to know that I can count on a Librem n+1 being available so that I won't have to change ecosystem once again.
I've bought a few open source/homebrew systems over the years, mainly handheld consoles to run emulators. It works but the software is often rather lackluster and very amateur looking. It's also generally maintained for a little while then the contributors move on to something else. It's fine for a toy emulator console, not so much for a smartphone.
The ubports team developed something called halium to address this: its more or less an android emulator that has apparently been working for a couple of years now in testing at least. Its in the purism future goals to add this iirc.
That's sort of the issue the OpenMoko faced. It was designed to be a device with long-lasting support - but support died quickly because so few people had one.
TBH community distros were pretty long lived (and let's be honest, those were the only ones that mattered). At least SHR was actively maintained to around 2012, with last generated image being from April 2013, and I seem to remember QtMoko being maintained even tad longer. IMO that wasn't bad for a device released in 2008, especially for today's standards.
Until they can say "Mainline Linux kernel can run on the device without modifications", I don't believe them about the "don't throw away after a few years"-aspect.
Maybe being a little bit too cynic, but markets need consumers to 'renew' their products. Otherwise, how can you have never ending growth and capitalist wealth. It's all tied together, pre-planned obsolescence comes with our current economic system.
I would gladly discuss this opinion with any sensible arguments and nuances.
> . It's not just about building the phone (which is already very difficult), it's also about maintaining the software and app ecosystem in the long term.
I doubt the Purism folks are unaware of this, but I think this running a standard GNU/Linux stack as opposed to what Ubuntu Touch/Firefox OS were doing, gives it at least a shot.
I'd say it's a misguided comparison since Microsoft and Librem have very different goals.
I'm sure Microsoft would've no problem making profitable phones, but if their goal is to obtain as many users as possible, as fast as possible, by spending millions upon millions on marketing and other endeavors then it becomes a lot more difficult.
You are right. Although I think that most are just lurking around even when positive. There is not much to be said if you just like the project. But people can always complain.
I like the project with some minor reservations, but there is not much to discuss at this point. I'm not gonna cheerlead. My biggest regret is price and size. I'm waiting for more information on Necuno Mobile [0] as I believe it will be in my price range, however with worse hardware. But they both can share software and that's great.
As for Purism I will wait for when it's cheaper or I will have more money to spend. I would buy one if it would be in a notebook or netbook form though. That's also what I'm hoping for - an iMX8M laptop.
Thanks for introducing Necuno, I hadn't heard about it. Apparently [0] it's been mentioned here a few times, but never got more than one comment. At the moment they don't have a lot of info, other than some of the hardware used and that it's a linux kernel. Looking forward to hearing more.
There are various Chromebooks that you can put standard Linux on.
I've got an Acer R11 which I put GalliumOS on (definitely use 2.1 / 2.2, 3.0 has issues). If you really want ARM, there are options there, though I'm not sure about regular Linux support on those.
The R11 is small and handy, with a decent keyboard. Battery life isn't quite as good as with ChromeOS, but still sufficient.
Have Purism explained their processor choice anywhere? It would have been nice to have used the i.MX 8 QuadMax - it would have given a little more hope for the phone lasting.
Oh, I didn't know. Nevertheless a Pinebook with Vivante graphics at up to $250 would be pretty nice. If there is a better SoC with as good mainline support, all the better.
Totally agree. I don’t feel like I can pay for a phone right now but I’m already working on an app for it.
Also donating some time and money to postmarketOS and ubports(the community continuation of the ubuntu phone) because I really want any or all of these to be successful.
I agree with these points, but the device also needs to offer a good experience (like responsiveness, speed, camera/photo/video quality) and a starter set of apps. The former is where Firefox OS went wrong (IMO) by going low end and having a terrible experience. The latter seems to be an issue with the Librem phone since it comes with very few apps that most people generally use. I seriously wish this project the best, because we need good alternatives for people outside the two main smartphone OSes. But I personally cannot use this phone as my only device at this point.
Realistically the only way I can think of to have a purely open source phone, is to not implement it as a mobile phone at all. You can do voice and interface to the pstn with a purely open source asterisk and sip softphone software combination. If you're a super gpl zealot, do it on one of the few thinkpads that can have its bios flashed with a open source version.
Sorry it's not very portable, beyond whatever subnotebook sized x86-64 system you can run it on. Where your phone calls meet ss7 and the pstn is still going to be totally closed source and opaque to you.
Indeed. The first step is commoditizing and genericizing mobile hardware, like what happened to the PC market in the 80s. Purism is taking a big leap at this, and I definitely want to encourage that.
Is it possible to buy one of those phones? As in I pay and get a physical thing for the money in a couple of days?
I ask because I wanted to buy a Firefox OS phone and it was impossible. There were preorders and non-official compatible terminals, but the official, all hardware working, reasonably featured ones were impossible to get.
It most likely will never make it to production. At this point in time, if the creators were being honest, they would either have announced an OEM sign up, or have announced that it has already been delayed beyond Spring 2019.
As much as I like donations to causes, donations to doomed causes who aren't honest about the probability they'll ever come close to a reality are useless.
They advertise lifetime updates for a product they don't even have a supply chain lined up? Really? And the money spent will serve to (according to them) support the development process? So who will actually pay for the phones ordered?
Wishful thinking is nice, but it is nothing beyond wishful.
regarding date and supply chain uncertainty i would tend to agree.
in this case however, they do sell laptops. so, they aren’t completely incapable of supply chain.
depending on if the laptop is really an in-house design, or not, they may be certainly going from a very basic to an extremely sophisticated supply chain.
or it could be that it’s not an in-house design fully and someone else is doing the supply chain and general design of the hardware.
the date is extremely optimistic or the handset hardware is much farther along than is obvious from the content on the site.
having said that i am a backer and can’t wait. vote with your dollar i suppose.
Anybody is capable of supply chain. I can fly into Shenzhen, shop around for ODMs and in a day have an order for a custom designed phone based on an ODMs white label model, with my logo, brand name, app preloads, etc.
Anyone can do it, because it can all be outsourced. But they don't talk about any of it.
Not only that, but they say that the cash from preorders will be used for development, which raises the question: who will pay for the actual devices of those who pre-ordered?
Give it another year or so and they'll inevitably fold, not returning any money to those who pre-ordered and posting a cute, self-pitting story about all the challenges they faces on such a honorable mission.
Buy one of these phones because you
- Want a 'free' phone to exist in the future
- Want an open source phone to exist in the future
- Want a secure phone to exist in the future
It may not be up to your standards now, but without your support (money) it will never exist.
If you have the money to spend, then spend it. Consider it a donation to the cause.