Fairphone: Our approach to software and ongoing support for the first Fairphones

Over at the Fairphone blog, Kees Jongenburger reflects on what went right—and wrong—for the software that went into the first version of the Fairphone, which is a project aimed at creating a mobile phone that is, well, more "fair". The project seeks to inject social values into the supply chain so that minerals come from conflict-free mining, for example, and that the workers are provided with a living wage. "Fairphone’s high-level ambition is to bring more fairness to software. To us, that means focusing on two key principles: transparency and longevity. We believe products should be long-lasting. The longer a phone lasts, the less waste it creates and the fewer resources it requires. Longevity plays a role in hardware choices; and at the software level, longevity means keeping the software up-to-date and secure after the product was sold. Openness ties directly into our ideas for longevity. We believe that our community should have access to the source code of our software to make improvements, add cool functionality, and extend usability. We believe that releasing the code as open source will prolong the life of the phone past its commercial life. For the first Fairphone, we pinpointed a number of (in retrospect, over-ambitious) goals that aligned with the ideas of transparency and longevity." We looked at Fairphone back in July 2013. (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

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