Wishful thinking?

Posted Jan 20, 2017 23:22 UTC (Fri) by sebas (guest, #51660)
In reply to: Wishful thinking? by coriordan
Parent article: An updated FSF high-priority project list

The hardware and driver side is an unsolved problem indeed. In Plasma Mobile, we're struggling with this as well. Right now, the only viable choice to get Plasma running on a mobile phone that people can actually buy is to build on top of an Android base and go through libhybris. It ends up being a pretty painful process, with lots of problems in hardware details that may or may not work, with the solution often being in the hands of hardware vendors that simply don't care, because for them, the numbers don't add up in the time-frames they're looking at.

The rest of the stack suffers from a lack of interest. I think that a community-developed project is exactly what's needed. With Plasma Mobile's stack above these hardware issues, we can share most of the code between different devices and make them work well together, and with the right set of priorities in mind, in a transparent process, open standards and open source code. What we need is a more people actually joining in, making hardware work, help us on the code, design, ideas, concepts, bugs, infrastructure, support, developers that make their applications work, and people that "simply" participate in solving the problems we're facing.

The situation in the past two years hasn't been looking good, more and more promising projects are suffering from serious structural problems, are being shut down or admitting defeat. Firefox OS, Jolla, Ubuntu Phone, CyanogenMod all haven't taken on or are already out of existence. In that sense, I think we're worse off from a Free software point of view than we were two years ago. Even Windows Phone is essentially dead. Plasma Mobile isn't, and we've been working on making it a functional platform, but with the current level of resources invested by everyone, it's not enough. This could change, and I'm hopeful that the we can do a good enough job showing that it isn't just a far-away pipe-dream to have phones that actually get us back into control of privacy, security, support and the general technical direction, but that we need people that step up and help us do the work to bring it to a good enough state that phone vendors and carriers that offer phones can ship devices like these. It's not impossible, but it's not an easy or quick problem to solve. It needs some serious commitment by the right people.

Wishful thinking?

Posted Jan 21, 2017 5:35 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

I would encourage you to get Plasma Mobile packaged for Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, Mageia and the other community based Linux distributions. Having a great UI might encourage folks to port Linux to more devices and do reverse engineering of the blobs.

Wishful thinking?

Posted Jan 23, 2017 10:42 UTC (Mon) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link]

That's exactly my point: We do not lack people who encourage us to do something. We do not lack project managers. We do lack people who are willing to get their hands dirty, who scratch their own itch. Quite simply, we have enough places that would greatly enhance our outreach, and packaging / integration in the distribution is simply lower on the list than having at least one working prototype, well integrated, and being able to develop software for at all. No use putting work into packaging for 5 different distros when that means that we don't have time left to actually work on the code.