LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 1, 2013

The "fair" phone

Amidst all the hubbub surrounding the Ubuntu Edge crowdfunding effort, we came across another, similar effort that merits a look: the Fairphone. Its vision is different than Canonical's convergence concept, but it is also using crowdfunding to jumpstart production. Fairphone is more than just technology, however, as the company seeks to redefine the economics and supply chains of phones (and other electronics) with the goals of more transparency and ... well ... fairness.

The goals are ambitious, but one milestone has already been met. The crowdfunding target of 5,000 phones (at €325) was easily met in June, three weeks into its month-long campaign. Over 10,000 were eventually sold. The money raised has allowed the non-profit to build 20,000 phones, so there are still phones available—at the original price. The phones are only available in Europe, at least currently, though there are hints that other regions will be added eventually. The delivery date is expected to be in October.

For phone hardware, the first Fairphone model is solid, but not spectacular: a quad-core 1.2 GHz ARM processor running a customized Android 4.2 with 1G of RAM, 16G of storage, 4.3" display (960x540), dual SIM slots, removable battery, 8 and 1.3 megapixel cameras, the usual array of sensors, and so on. No chargers or headphones are included and the phone is said to use "minimal packaging". Both of those are in keeping with the low-impact mission of Fairphone.

The company got its start in 2010 as a research project of several Dutch non-profit organizations to gather information and raise awareness of the conflicts and wars fueled by the extraction of minerals used in consumer electronics. That research, which focused on minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, took three years. The phone project came about in 2013 with the "aim of designing, creating and producing our first smartphone and taking the next crucial step in uncovering the story behind the sourcing, production, distribution and recycling of electronics", according to the company web site.

So Fairphone wants to produce a long-lasting phone (to reduce waste) that is made from "conflict-free" minerals, mined by workers who are paid a fair wage. In fact, the goal is that all of the workers in the supply chain are paid a fair wage and work under reasonable conditions (both from a safety and environmental protection standpoint). The company is also conscious of reducing e-waste; recycling and reusing any materials that can be. "Our end goal is fewer phones in circulation – not more".

Obviously, those are some ambitious goals—overly ambitious, some would say. But they are worthwhile goals. Anything that can be learned from pursuing them will be valuable information that can be used by other device makers. This is an area where Fairphone clearly shines, as transparency is yet another goal of the project. That leads to blog posts detailing the production process, including sourcing conflict-free tin paste and tantalum capacitors, packaging issues, and more. In fact, the blog has a wealth of information about various facets of Fairphone, its mission, and its progress.

Transparency is not limited to the production process. Pricing, and how €325 was arrived at, are part of what Fairphone will be disclosing. The design of the phone is open as well. As might be guessed for a company whose manifesto is "if you can't open it, you don't own it", the phone is rootable and the OS is easily replaceable. There is mention of both Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS as possible replacements—CyanogenMod seems like it should be a slam dunk.

Like many of the goals, the transparency goals have not been completely met. More information is pending on pricing, for example, and the list of suppliers [PDF] is incomplete, but the intentions seem good. Given that it all started as a research project, which morphed into an actual product, it may take some time to fully realize all of the goals.

In fact, full realization of the goals of the project are probably many years away, if ever. Not all of the components will be "conflict free", for example, at least in the first model. As described in a ZDNet article, the company is running into many of the same issues that other phone and device-makers have hit—it's simply not easy to change the parts that go into a device. But, that doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying.

From a cost perspective, the Fairphone seems fairly reasonable. Many smartphones are substantially more expensive. The extra effort in making a cleaner and more fair device seems to come almost for free. It's a bit hard to see major phone makers switching to conflict-free tin paste (or fair pay throughout the supply chain) any time soon, as it might impact the all-important bottom line. Over time, though, efforts like Fairphone may help bring the costs down to a level where the "big boys" will start using them. It may also raise consumer awareness to a point where there is demand for devices of this nature. Either outcome would certainly be a step in the right direction.

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Non-profits, foundations, and umbrella organizations

O'Reilly celebrated 15 years of its OSCON open source convention this year. The success of OSCON mirrors the success of the wider open-source community. This success has caused many open source projects to investigate ways of formalizing their governance and corporate structures. Several sessions at OSCON covered aspects of open source non-profits, such as reasons for establishing a non-profit for a project as well as reasons for looking at alternative solutions. In addition, several of those alternatives — existing non-profit "umbrella" organizations — described the services they provide to open source projects.

Should you start a new non-profit?

Dave Neary, a board member of the Yorba Foundation and a long-time member of the GNOME Foundation, gave a talk that tackled whether a project should start a new non-profit (slides [SlideShare]). Neary shared some of the reasons for starting a non-profit, separating them into three categories. The first is to provide a financial infrastructure for a project. This includes opening a bank account, being able to make contracts with venues as a legal entity rather than as an individual, and reimbursing volunteers for travel. These activities are difficult for individuals. While some projects put money into the personal account of a volunteer, Neary stressed that this is "not a good idea".

Second, a corporate structure helps insulate members from liability. If you're working in IT, you're exposing yourself to risk, he said. Similarly, you're exposing yourself to risk when you sign contracts for a conference venue. If something goes wrong, you're liable. Neary said that "you want an entity that protects you from that".

Finally, there are reasons related to governance and pooling of resources. A non-profit organization can help to formalize the governance rules of the project, although Neary believes that this should be done within the community rather than the organization. A non-profit entity can also provide a level playing field for projects with major corporate involvement, and it can be used to pool resources from corporations participating in a project. It can also be an entity to assign trademarks or copyrights to.

Costs

While there are good reasons for starting a non-profit, there are also significant costs. Neary believes that the costs outweigh the benefits in most cases. First, you need money to start a non-profit. You need a lawyer to draft the by-laws of the organization and to do various other paperwork. A bookkeeper has to be paid to do annual returns and possibly run payroll (if you're planning to hire staff).

Neary remarked that interesting projects can usually find the funds required to start a non-profit, but there is a much bigger cost: time, which is "something you cannot get back". According to Neary, the amount of time you'll spend is significant — one volunteer will spend all of their volunteer time on non-profit-related activities and bureaucracy every year. Furthermore, it's quite likely that the volunteer will burn out after a year or two. Many people underestimate the amount of ongoing work that running an organization requires, such as making sure elections happen and that paperwork is filed on time. Another problem is that the approval time for open source related 501(c)(3) organizations (US-based charities) has to be measured in years at the moment, partly because open source has found its way onto a watch list.

Finally, another significant cost is the risks and responsibilities for the people involved. The president and board are accountable for the organization, both fiscally and legally. This is a great responsibility and you have to think carefully about it.

Alternatives

Given the significant costs of starting and running a non-profit organization, projects will want to consider alternatives; Neary outlined three possibilities. The obvious alternative is to join an existing umbrella organization. This is a good way to "get most of the goodies and avoid most of the bad stuff". Neary cited some established organizations, such as the Software Freedom Conservancy, Software in the Public Interest, and the Outercurve Foundation. He also noted that several projects have grown to a point where they provide services to other projects, such as the Apache Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, and KDE e.V..

The second option is to find a "sugar daddy" — a benevolent corporate sponsor. In an ideal scenario, the corporate sponsor would provide financial resources (directly and by employing developers) and other services, such as organizing events and helping with legal matters. At the same time, the company would provide a level playing field by leaving it up to the community to manage the project.

Unfortunately, there are considerable risks with this approach. Neary remarked that winds of change often blow through companies, for example when a new CEO comes in, and this may lead to a desire to monetize the project. He cited OpenOffice, MySQL, and Symbian to illustrate the dangers. It's also possible that the project might get neglected if it's no longer part of the core of what the company does.

Neary remarked that this model has worked well for several projects in the short term, but that the long-term viability is questionable. If you want a vibrant community with individuals and companies contributing, this is probably not the model to follow, he said.

The third option is to use management services. You can offload financial and administrative work to another organization, but such services will obviously cost money. The Outercurve Foundation, which has outsourced the majority of its administrative work, was given as a successful example of this approach. One problem, according to Neary, is that you're not getting the benefit of the organization being aligned with your community.

Given the work involved in running a non-profit and the problematic aspects of the alternatives, Neary suggested that joining an umbrella organization is probably the way to go for most projects. In the discussion following Neary's talk, the question of whether there are circumstances under which it makes sense to start a non-profit was raised. Simon Phipps commented that a separate organization may be the right solution if the administrative needs of a project would overwhelm the fiscal sponsor. He named OpenStack as a project that required its own foundation given the level of activity around it and its desire to hire several staff members. While forming an organization may make sense for large projects, Phipps cautioned that "everyone thinks they are one of those and honestly you're not".

Non-profit organizations for FLOSS projects

Bradley M. Kuhn, the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, organized a session at OSCON in which several non-profit organizations introduced themselves. This allowed projects wishing to join an existing organization to get an overview of the range of options to choose from.

Josh Berkus, the Assistant Treasurer of Software in the Public Interest (SPI), introduced SPI as a "minimalist financial sponsor". SPI was initially created to act as the fiscal sponsor for the Debian project, but it has over 30 projects at this point. It provides basic services, such as the ability to receive charitable donations, collective ownership of project assets, and light legal assistance.

SPI does not provide project infrastructure, start-up funds, liability protection, or advice with project governance. An advantage of SPI is that it does not dictate any specific governance or infrastructure, and that it does not require exclusive representation. Some projects use SPI to hold funds in the US while making use of other organizations to do the same in Europe. Berkus said that SPI would be a good choice for projects that just need a bank account or want to run a fundraising campaign.

Kuhn followed Berkus and described SPI as a grantor/grantee fiscal sponsor. Software Freedom Conservancy, on the other hand, is a "direct project", or comprehensive, sponsor. What this means is that projects affiliate with SPI whereas a project joining Conservancy actually becomes part of the organization. (See this recent LWN article for a detailed explanation of these two models.) Kuhn compared it to becoming a wholly owned subsidiary — a project is a "division" within Conservancy and has its own committee, but ultimately Conservancy is the legal entity, which has to ensure that regulations are followed.

The benefits of this approach are that Conservancy can offer liability protection for volunteer developers, and that it can officially act in the name of project, for example when signing a venue contract. The downside is that there is more oversight of the project as Conservancy takes on the project's liability.

Conservancy offers a wide range of services from which projects can choose à la carte. Its services include asset management, legal assistance, help with conferences, fundraising, and more. Kuhn concluded that "you want us if you want full service".

Noirin Plunkett represented the Apache Software Foundation. She said that Apache offers indemnity to developers, infrastructure, and independence. There are several requirements to being an Apache project. Plunkett said that there is "no negotiation" with regard to these three requirements: the use of the Apache license, a collaborative, consensus-driven development process, and a diverse community. Commenting on the latter requirement, Plunkett remarked that "we don't have projects that have one sole source of contributors". Apache projects are also expected to use Apache infrastructure. There is diversity in other areas, though, such as the technology focus of a project, ranging from an office suite to a web server. Joining Apache involves an incubation process to ensure the project meets Apache's legal and community standards.

Ian Skerrett spoke about the Eclipse Foundation. Unlike the first three organizations, Eclipse is a 501(c)(6) organization, which is a US trade association — its goal is to promote the Eclipse community. Eclipse offers various services, including infrastructure, IP management, and community development. It has a lawyer and two paralegals on staff — Eclipse puts a lot of focus on IP management, scanning all code that comes into its repositories to ensure license compatibility and copyright pedigree.

Skerrett clarified some misconceptions people often have about Eclipse. First, Eclipse is technology neutral — while its focus used to be on Java, it has a lot of projects in other languages these days, including Lua and JavaScript. Second, Eclipse is forge neutral, having embraced GitHub in addition to its own infrastructure "just last month". Finally, Eclipse is flexible in terms of licensing. While the Eclipse Public License (EPL) is the default, exceptions can be granted to use other licenses.

Skerrett explained how Eclipse views success, as this influences the projects it is interested in. In addition to large numbers of users and contributions, Eclipse sees commercial adoption of its projects as a key factor of success. Specifically, Eclipse is a great place for building industry platforms.

Paula Hunter explained that the Outercurve Foundation provides business operations, technical services, and a legal structure for its projects. Outercurve is open to many projects — it is not tied to a particular license, technology base, or development process. The only requirements in terms of the development process is that the project needs to have one. Outercurve offers a neutral place for people to collaborate and Hunter believes that neutrality encourages contributions. She mentioned that projects hosted by Outercurve — originally started by Microsoft — have almost 400 developers now and that less than 40% are employed by Microsoft.

Hunter said that the key question for her is how Outercurve can help projects be successful. In order to support projects, Outercurve maps out services throughout the lifecycle of a project. This includes concept stage, launch, building community, and adoption.

Jim Zemlin was the last speaker and he joked that the Linux Foundation provides the "same things" as the other organizations, "only better". Instead of running through the service catalog of the Linux Foundation, Zemlin talked about the importance of FOSS foundations. He discussed the role of standards bodies, like ISO, in supporting collaborative standards development and noted that FOSS foundations play a similar role for open source. They support a collaborative development process, which is a "better, faster way to innovate", according to Zemlin. Noting that people use Linux multiple times every day and don't even know it, he said that it's the "coal and steel of our time" — but "instead of being owned by the Carnegies, it's owned by us".

Discussion

The non-profit sessions at OSCON led to various interesting discussions. One question that came up several times was about non-profit options in Europe. There are various open source organizations in Europe, such as KDE e.V., the Document Foundation, and the OW2 Consortium. Unfortunately, it's difficult to have a European-wide organization, and many countries have different non-profit structures. For example, Phipps mentioned the concept of a Community Interest Company in the UK and suggested that it deserves further investigation.

Another takeaway is that it is important to consider how well aligned the project is with the organization. When the Vert.x project was looking for a home, several organizations offered. One such organization was the Software Freedom Conservancy, but Kuhn (its Executive Director) openly admitted that Eclipse or Apache were a better fit due to their stronger connections to the Java community.

Finally, it is important to remember that projects give up some control by joining an umbrella organization. How much, and what kind, depends on the particular organization they are joining. Projects interested in joining an umbrella organization are therefore advised to carefully evaluate their options.

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Jolla: Sailfish OS, Qt, and open source

Jolla's Vesa-Matti Hartikainen came to Akademy 2013 to talk about—and show off—the new Jolla phone with Sailfish OS. Like a number of related projects, Jolla (pronounced as "Yo-la") was created in the wake of Nokia's move away from MeeGo. While Sailfish OS is based on Linux and many other open source technologies, the "user experience" (UX) layer is (currently) closed, but it's clear that Jolla has put a lot of thought into how to interact with a mobile phone. Whether that translates to success in the marketplace remains to be seen, but Hartikainen's demo was impressive.

Hartikainen began by noting that he is an engineer at Jolla, so he does "code—real stuff". Some of the software he will be showing was written by him, and much of the rest was written by his friends and colleagues. His talk was about "Sailfish OS, open source, and Qt" which covers "who we are", "what we do", and "how we do it", he said.

He switched to a bit of history, going back to the beginning of 2011, when "Nokia was a coward" that "didn't believe in themselves", and killed its own platforms. That was when Nokia switched to Windows Mobile for its phones. Several MeeGo people who were working on the N9 phone (which ran a MeeGo derivative of sorts) recognized that the MeeGo platform was a good one and was open source. They wanted to continue working with MeeGo, so they started the process of creating a company to do so. That company is Jolla.

Starting the company

In order to start a company, you need people, money, and technology, Hartikainen said. Initially it looked like MeeGo would be the technology. Lots of people were getting laid off from Nokia and other MeeGo contractors, which would help fill the people requirement. Money took a bit longer. After a year or so, though, there was enough money and confidence to announce the company as a continuation of the legacies of the N9 and MeeGo.

At roughly the same time, Nokia had "another strategy change" and decided to give up on Qt. It sold Qt to Digia and many of the Nokia Qt employees also made the switch, but some did not, including teams working on QML and Qt Mobility. So Jolla recruited some of those people and was able to build a Qt team that way, he said.

Somewhere in all of that, Intel also gave up on MeeGo and moved on to Tizen (which was not Qt-based), which resulted in the creation of Mer—a stripped-down version of MeeGo. Another project is Nemo mobile, which continues the MeeGo handset path. Nemo mobile provides packages for applications like a dialer and for SMS messaging. Jolla uses Mer for the core of its OS and Nemo mobile for some of the "middleware" applications.

But Jolla also needed something unique to offer, Hartikainen said. It was determined that the UX would be the differentiator for the phone. Luckily, there were a lot of talented designers available as well, due to the MeeGo fallout. The folks at Jolla had already knew many of those designers, knew "they were easy to work with", and those designers could create "innovative ideas" that the other companies were too afraid to try.

In June there was a public launch of the resulting "Jolla phone". It is a "real thing", he said, and held one up to show. Currently, the team is working on the "final stretch": last minute bugs, optimizations, and small features, to get it ready to go into stores.

Demo

At that point, he asked a colleague to run a video camera while he operated the phone. That allowed the audience to see the phone and the UX as exercised by Hartikainen. He started with the "basic lockscreen", which has notifications that can be accessed by pulling right, a "pulley menu" that is accessed by pulling down, or the main screen which is reached by pulling up to "open the phone". Unlike Android's notifications, he said, you don't need to pull all the way from the top, pulling (i.e. a one-finger swipe-like gesture) from anywhere on the screen in the proper direction will activate the feature.

The interface seems to be more gesture oriented than other phones. As he was showing different features, there were numerous different gestures used, which may require users to learn more before they can get the most out of the phone. For example, there is no back button, so swiping from the left goes back. In addition, status items like time, power, network status, and so on, are on their own screen, rather than lined up across the top as in most phones. That screen can be "peeked" at by pushing partly across the screen from the right. Once the finger is lifted, the display returns to wherever it was.

Leaving the status off each screen is part of the design philosophy of using the screen real estate for user or app content, rather than controls. The "pulley menu" which can be pulled down from the top is another example. It is application specific, with haptic and sound feedback for each menu item that makes it "almost" able to be used without looking, Hartikainen said. When it is not needed, though, it takes up no screen real estate for a button or control. One can also interact with running apps from the multitasking screen (which has thumbnails of each running app), rather than switching to them (by tapping), you can use gestures on the thumbnail to perform certain actions (e.g. switch songs).

There are various ways to personalize the device, as well. The "ambience" feature allows you to choose a photo from the gallery as a background, and the phone will switch its interface colors to match the "mood" of the photo. Ambience will also be tied in with the idea of the "other half", which is an intelligent back cover for the phone (aka "active covers"). Attaching different covers will change the ambience of the phone, but it may also do more than that. Hartikainen described a "party profile" that might be associated with a red cover; when it is attached, perhaps work email and certain incoming phone calls would be disabled along with other changes that correspond to a party mood.

The covers have both data and power connections, so they could serve other purposes as well. Additional battery power or a hardware keyboard are two that were mentioned. The protocols and pinout information will be available, so the hope is that other companies come up with their own innovative ideas.

Hartikainen showed a few more features of the interface, including the event feed, which is accessed by pulling up. It is similar to that of the N9, he said, but you can "+1", "Like", or comment on an event directly in the feed, there is no need to open an app or web site. The app store is meant to be a "social store", he said, with true recommendations from friends. But that is "hard to get right".

More details

The device he showed is a prototype, the final device will be smaller, but even now it is "so nice" to use, he said. That ended the demo, and he moved into a rundown of the specifications of the device: 4.5" display, dual-core processor, "nice camera", user-replaceable battery, and so on. There is a runtime for Android apps, so any that are absolutely required and only available for that platform can still be run on the phone. Those apps will provide an "Android experience", rather than the normal Jolla experience (no ambience, pulley menu, or interaction with an active cover, for example).

To sum up the user interface, Hartikainen said, it is meant to be beautiful and personal. It maximizes the screen space for user content and uses gestures rather than tapping for control. It provides a modern look, he said, but is "not boring".

Before his talk, everyone told him that he "needed technical details" in it, he said, so he turned to the architecture of Sailfish OS. The user interface layer is Jolla-specific and is currently closed, but it will not remain that way forever. Parts of the Sailfish Silica QML components were released under a BSD license with the alpha SDK; the native (C++) code parts will follow "soon". Silica is what is used internally as well; there is "no secret magic", as everything uses the Silica API. The Jolla team in Australia has been working on QML performance and have gotten it to work "extremely well", even on older hardware.

On the "middleware side", there is Nemo, he said. It provides services like tracker for indexing multimedia, mallit for virtual keyboards, lipstick for building home screens, grillo for multimedia, Gecko for the web, and so on. Under that is Mer, which provides Gstreamer, ConnMan, Qt 5, Wayland, PulseAudio, and systemd "for startup". It is, he said, a very normal Linux distribution, just with a "tight set of packages" so that a small company like Jolla can maintain it.

The Sailfish SDK is based on Qt Creator and virtual machines: one as a build engine and the other as an emulator. The emulator runs a full x86 version of Sailfish OS. Because of that, much of the development for the phone can be done just using the SDK, he said.

Jolla is not just "sitting alone at home coding", but instead does a lot of collaboration with other projects. The main projects Jolla works with are Qt, Mer, and Nemo. Jolla started with Qt 4.8 and added some hardware-specific code and optimizations; eventually backporting some Qt 5 code to 4.8. Since then, it has moved on to Qt 5 and the main focus right now is to "get Qt 5 fast as hell" on Wayland and ARM.

"We are a small company", Hartikainen said, so right now the intent is to ship products before it does more ambitious things, such as helping out more on Qt upstream. Jolla is the main contributor to the Mer project; "we love it". It is also a "significant contributor" to Nemo, mostly in the middleware layer (as Jolla does not use the Nemo UX)

Jolla has two offices, in Tampere and Helsinki, Finland, and a "bunch of people working from home" in various locations around the world. There is "light process" in the company and it takes an iterative approach to solving problems, especially in the user interface design. Most importantly, though, it is not afraid of change, he said. Everything is set up to try new things quickly. It is an "open source way of working", he said, without that and open source software itself, "we wouldn't be here". Pull requests, patch reviews, IRC, and other distributed working environment techniques have made it all work for Jolla.

[Thanks to KDE e.V. for travel assistance to Bilbao for Akademy.]

Comments (18 posted)

Page editor: Jonathan Corbet

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

• Security: Mozilla PiCL; New vulnerabilities in bind9, gnupg, java, mysql, ...
• Kernel: I/O Hook; Transparent decompression for ext4; Device trees as ABI.
• Distributions: Fedora keeps sendmail — for now; Fedora, RHEL, ...
• Development: Guix brings GNU packages to you; LibreOffice 4.1; Lua turns 20; CyanogenMod's Focal app; ...
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