Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica)

This is unfair. You're completely ignoring the economies of scale which apply to manufacturing hardware, but don't apply to writing software.

Until the demand for hardware like this increases to the same level as that for mass-market devices, it will remain impossible to manufacture for a comparably low cost.

I'm in the same camp - but with computers it's a totally different story due to hardware standardisation. I hardly buy any computer any more - I just take a throwaway from the last 10 years and put current Debian on it; it will keep on running, with full security patches, until some component breaks.

With telephones, in spite of Cyanogen/LineageOS, and until PostmarketOS comes to the masses, the situation is so bad that not only can we not recycle old hardware but the community has to construct its own, fighting against all economy of scale.

I wish the Librem folks best of success; and same for the upcoming Pinephone and other Pine64 products. Pine64 seem to go for less performance, at a much lower price. All of these endeavours are risky - if a Free software does not find many users, it can still be going strong in a small community. A small hardware company can get bust just for a minor miscalculation. So I wish that all of them succeed.

I came for the free beer, but I stayed for the free speech.

So this phone might not get people into Free Software. GNU was also developed for the kind of hardware that most computer professionals couldn't afford for themselves. The point is, for now, that people who want a phone running entirely Free Software now have an option to do so. It's another step on the path. We don't have to make the journey all at once, just so long as we keep taking steps forward.

I'm glad that we have open source software and operating systems for people who can't afford to pay for stuff like an OEM license for Windows when they build a computer or refurbish an old one, or people who want to do something on their computer but can't afford subscriptions or licenses for things like Adobe applications or Microsoft Office.

But developing something like the Librem 5 has a lot of startup and production costs that need to be offset if people care about software freedom and privacy. It's a risk for the people who fund it to try to provide this, and (as others have noted) they do not have economies of scale that Apple or Samsung have. They also don't have the associated revenue from putting users in a walled garden for services like Apple Music or Apple Payments (or whatever it's called, I can't be bothered to look up the accurate brand right now).

Running small businesses with limited cash flow is a lot more expensive per unit than the big businesses that don't respect your privacy or freedom. The specific example you have here may be a company ripping users off, but the phone that started the discussion is not. Overall the companies trying to offer users "free" hardware and such are not people getting rich off of "certified free" hardware, they're providing a service that most companies won't and probably taking a fair risk in terms of staying in business and not losing money.

(And as companies like VA Linux Systems found out, if they do pioneer a market where it turns out there's money to be made from "certified free" hardware, they'll probably be put out of business as soon as Dell or another company decides to use its economies of scale to jump into the market...)

Sure, a PiZeroPhone would be interesting, but it would also have an abysmal battery life and/or weight.

That requires someone to have already mass-produced components that meet your requirements. If your requirement are unusual (like Purism's) then probably nobody has done that. You have to sacrifice some requirements (like cost and size and power) and cobble together the best components you can find, and the result will be far from ideal.

> For instance, something that you slip a Pi Zero into?

The Pi Zero has a 1GHz single-core ARM11 CPU and 512MB RAM. Performance would be awful compared to the Librem 5, and unusable for typical smartphone uses (e.g. web browsing). And it still has proprietary firmware that can't be isolated from the CPU, so it doesn't meet the freedom/security goals.

> Even things like 4G modems etc. aren't that hard to come by as a module.

The Librem 5 does use a 4G modem module, connected to an M.2 slot. The downsides are it's relatively bulky and expensive, and also lacks freedom/security (except to the extent that it can be isolated from the rest of the system).

> It's about time that someone got together and just made all kinds of standardised modules, with open connectivity between them (e.g. I2C etc.), small enough for embedded and smartphone use, and then put their money into making those.

That sounds rather like Google's Project Ara (which failed).

I really don't understand the demands for time sensitivity on this -- either in the mobile space or on distros, to be frank. I mean, how often do you have to synchronously perform an update except in a framework where you're being paid to make sure that it works successfully?

On mobile devices, just say "updating in background" and be done with it. Half the time the end user isn't going to know or care that it's slow, as that's always a possibility depending on network downlink speed (and customers rarely have detailed visibility into what's going on anyway).

On Linux distros, sure speed is nice, but I find it hard to imagine a situation where I actually have to care about apt or yum's dependency resolution and calculation. Certainly it was never degenerate enough that I felt that the switch to DNF was worth it, even though they kept on using that as a selling point. ("Seth is sadly no longer available to support this software" is a reason; "RPM calculation is 15% faster" is not, if it comes with bugs thanks to a codebase swap.)

I update my apps via Google Play currently once a week. It usually needs ca. 10 minutes. My Internet connection has 100 MBit/s, so it's not a bandwidth issue.

You write that "Google Store updates are very fast". Do you mean updates via Google Play?

I don't consider them to be fast. My updates for Debian, OpenSUSE, and CentOS are much faster - via the same connection and for many more and larger packages.