LWN: Comments on "Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica)"

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

mathstuf — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 20:56:36 +0000

Sort of a tangent here, but what makes dnf a pig and zypper so nice? For a previous yum user, dnf is perfect since it's no different than before. Granted I've never used zypper itself (yast for the brief stint I had a suse install, but I went back to Fedora (10?) after a few weeks), so I just don't know.

I do agree that apt is obtuse and hard to use. The suite of tools hasn't had an overarching thought applied to it and I always have to look up how to ask things like "what files are in this package" and "what package contains this file". Auto-accept on no-new-dep installs and auto-enable of daemons has also been frustrating.

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

jospoortvliet — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 17:22:49 +0000

Same here, I think many feel the same, reading this.

(on Fairphone)

jospoortvliet — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 17:20:45 +0000

Fairphone is arguably trying to solve a far easier problem, and thus can use far more mainstream hardware. It can simply use the mainstream SoC's for example... And yes, I know the problem they address isn't EASY. Just easier than what Purism tries to deal with. Now imagine a phone trying to fix BOTH problems at once... 🤯

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

jospoortvliet — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 16:50:04 +0000

The smartest move would be, if you're putting in so much effort in building a phone OS anyway, to fix APT - do what Red Hat did, take libsolv from the openSUSE folks. As openSUSE systems typically have over 20 repositories enabled, with some users running over than 200 repo's enabled*, zypper was early in its life confronted with the fact that it needed a much better solver than what apt and yum were getting away with. So, the story goes, SUSE management tasked the compiler developer team to develop a solver library that the zypper team could use. They build one. It was fast. End of story.

You know, it's open source. It can be adopted, as Red Hat did show. They still didn't do a very good job if you ask me (they just used the solver, not all of zypper, and dnf is quite an ugly pig compared to the easy cli of zypper) but it was a big improvement over the older versions. And while it'd be smart to just port over all of zypper (nicest package manager I've ever used), just taking libsolv would already be a big step up.

* I know this sounds insane to a Debian or Fedora users. But 1. the Open Build Service makes it possible to easily keep software fully build against a range of distribution versions so there are far more repo's available with special builds, older and newer versions, daily builds and so on for openSUSE and 2. people tend to do whatever is possible and the developers haven't thought about ;-)

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

bosyber — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 18:03:01 +0000

I wondered what had become of them, thanks for the tidbit of recent history.

More on topic:
I am currently not in the market for the librem phone, but as others have said as well, Free Hardware cannot use a bespoke chipset, nor all of the latest spec, or default hardware, which goes some way towards explaining the difference. And, apart from the hardware cost, and certainly for the first few versions, these are limited release prototype/engineering samples, but without a big company that partly funds those from the marketing budget.

None of this is a big issue, in my opinion, especially not during this phase. They are for a large part already paid for by people who are interested, and the big part is that they have a, mostly working first version, and a seemingly reasonable plan of how to get to full(er) feature completeness, and improved hardware.

And finally, another positive: this is a crowdfunded project, which not only got funded (hence money to build/assemble the thing), but also delivers (starts shipping) which still isn't all that common for complicated engineering products like this. So, congrats for the project, well done for persevering and pulling through.

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

Cyberax — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 17:47:58 +0000

I'm pretty sure it was just apt, I'm not using aptitude at all.

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

foom — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 13:02:45 +0000

> In my personal experience in one case APT took about 10 minutes to resolve deps during an especially hairy Debian upgrade.

I wonder if you may have used aptitude rather than actually apt-get/apt? Aptitude has a different, and famously sluggish, dependency resolver.

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

jschrod — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:42:33 +0000

I type this on a Pixel 3 with Android 10.

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.

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

oldtomas — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 07:59:16 +0000

What I'd like to see (as a kind of "meta" hack of sorts) is Fairphone and Purism joining forces in some way.

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

oldtomas — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 07:53:17 +0000

Nice to not feel alone :-)

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

Cyberax — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 22:32:07 +0000

> That's definitely pretty pathological -- I don't think I've ever had anything take longer than a minute and a half with pre-dnf yum, and that was on a full Fedora version upgrade.
This was Debian upgrade from stable to unstable, with many pinned packages and backports. So I guess it's probably not very representative, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to get into this state more easily.

> It might have happened once on an attempted EL5-EL6 upgrade, but that's kind of orthogonal, though. The parallel to that would be an Android System Update, and my LG is usually out of commission for a good 30m for that no matter what.
My Pixel was able to update itself to a new Android major version in less than 5 min downtime, which I consider quite impressive.

> This is a good point, but it's also something that could be dealt with through tweaks into packaging for that "distro" and other concerns. Power outages during any script will be a bad thing, but will be a bad thing in most any case.
Or perhaps by switching to a different packages, like Snap?

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

jccleaver — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 22:11:51 +0000

> In my personal experience in one case APT took about 10 minutes to resolve deps during an especially hairy Debian upgrade. On a powerful desktop computer. It'd probably drain battery completely if you try it on a phone.

That's definitely pretty pathological -- I don't think I've ever had anything take longer than a minute and a half with pre-dnf yum, and that was on a full Fedora version upgrade.

It might have happened once on an attempted EL5-EL6 upgrade, but that's kind of orthogonal, though. The parallel to that would be an Android System Update, and my LG is usually out of commission for a good 30m for that no matter what.

> So you come to New York and want to download a bus map application. Would you be OK with waiting for a couple of hours to do it?

No, of course not. But the difference between a 30 second download and 1 minute install and 45 second download and 2 minute install is not something super critical.

> Then there's a question of atomicity. Phones are famous for dying in various interesting ways and you really need to make sure that your package manager can recover from a partial installation. Neither APT nor RPM can do this completely reliably.

This is a good point, but it's also something that could be dealt with through tweaks into packaging for that "distro" and other concerns. Power outages during any script will be a bad thing, but will be a bad thing in most any case.

I'm not suggesting phones move to rpm/dpkg absent a compelling reason (running an OS that uses it is a compelling reason, IMO), I'm just saying that I don't get the demand for it at the expense of stability. I've been running RH back to the RHL6 days and yum update speed (even old school yum) has never been on my radar of things to care about.

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

Cyberax — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 21:47:30 +0000

In my personal experience in one case APT took about 10 minutes to resolve deps during an especially hairy Debian upgrade. On a powerful desktop computer. It'd probably drain battery completely if you try it on a phone.

> 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).
So you come to New York and want to download a bus map application. Would you be OK with waiting for a couple of hours to do it?

Then there's a question of atomicity. Phones are famous for dying in various interesting ways and you really need to make sure that your package manager can recover from a partial installation. Neither APT nor RPM can do this completely reliably.

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

jccleaver — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 21:13:09 +0000

> The problem with APT is that it can take quite a bit of time to resolve dependencies. Google Store updates are very fast - it's just writing a new copy of the app and doing some metadata updates. Additionally, it might involve AoT compilation of DEX code for some apps.

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.)

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

excors — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 15:15:06 +0000

> Then why not make a phone based on already mass-produced hardware.

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).

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

walters — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 14:32:31 +0000

Fedora has two different update mechanisms for host systems - there's your traditional dnf/yum and system-update; we also ship rpm-ostree for Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Silverblue which unifies online/offline updates, is image (OSTree) based and not package-based by default, is also fully transactional, etc.

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

smurf — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 11:24:09 +0000

Isn't that part of what the Freephone people are doing?

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

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

NAR — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 08:55:25 +0000

14 mm thick phones were in fashion 20 years ago. Maybe if this free phone could get into the next Matrix movie and be shown how cool it is, people would get interested in it...

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

spaetz — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 08:12:44 +0000

Sounds like a good plan. And I would be willing to buy that. However, if you follow the forums people are already complaining that a 14mm thick phone is way too thick and feels like a brick. I do not think a phone as you suggest would be thinner than that, I guess. Modularity comes at the price of space requirements unfortunately.

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

ledow — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 08:08:35 +0000

Then why not make a phone based on already mass-produced hardware.

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

Sure, the casings etc. will always be a one-off, but if you just use standardised modules, you could make it work, and the customer could even choose their own compute modules. Even things like 4G modems etc. aren't that hard to come by as a module.

It's being stuck in the "everything has to be put on one board" mindset.

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. Then there's a way to encourage competition, mass-produce a chip that you specialise in, gather components in new and interesting configurations, and tinkerers can put things together.

Pi hats are viable products and an awful lot of made. All you need is a "zero hat" which is tiny enough to connect and piggyback on the flat Zero board, and someone to make cases that hold a zero and a small number of hats, and you could have something that anyone could cobble a smartphone together from.

Trying to be end-to-end is not going to work on those kinds of scales. But having one company sell cases, another the main boards, several independent ones selling small certified modules, etc. would easily allow you to make such hardware and for everyone to make profit.

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

rickmoen — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 22:31:11 +0000

As someone who was employed at VA Linux Systems at the time, I can say you are quite mistaken about the course of events.

The dot-bomb tech recession of 2000 caused a unique combination of problems for VA Linux Systems and other Linux/*BSD-oriented hardware specialty firms. First, a large portion of the customer base went out of business in a short period of time, drying up new sales. Second and worse, as those firms went through liquidation, previously-sold recent hardware flooded back into the market as barely-used gear, such that VA Linux and similar firms were suddenly competing not only with Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, etc. but also with their own recent production.

Informed speculation within the firm suggests that CEO Larry Augustin strongly considered weathering out the hardware-business drought by staying in the game, but knew that the firm would, at least over the short term, need to contract to a fraction of its then-present size. So, he elected to try out two side-businesses to spread the risk: (1) a commercially supported fork of SourceForge as a corporate-hosted Web app, and (2) a storage (NetApp-like) division. The latter didn't work out and so was terminated first. That left the firm with its legacy hardware business plus SourceForge, and Larry made the decision around (if I recall correctly) 2002 to exit the hardware business and rename the firm to VA Software Corporation (and changed the market focus to proprietary software), reportedly deciding that it was too risky to try to risk survival in the hardware business under those extreme market conditions.

As it turns out, the latter decision Larry made was incorrect. Local small firm Californial Digital Corporation bought out VA Linux's remaining hardware inventory and, even though Larry's firm refused to give it VA Linux's customer lists or patents or trademarks, flourished in VA Linux Systems's exact hardware niche as the same hardware firm in all but name for the better part of the 2000s. VA's Doug Bone was there as part of technical management (and I went there too). The point is, VA Linux could have weathered the storm, if Larry had decided to try. Tragically for those of us who had faith in, supported, and worked hard for the original vision, he chose otherwise.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

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

jzb — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 12:12:27 +0000

"Worst thing is, probably a lot of people (like me) started using free operating systems on their computers because they weren’t as expensive as proprietary ones."

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...)

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

flussence — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 18:03:40 +0000

The TCO of a video game toy doesn't stop with the hardware.

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

jebba — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 17:57:48 +0000

This phone was also built using a free software toolchain:

"How We Designed the Librem 5 Dev Kit with 100% Free Software"
https://puri.sm/posts/how-we-designed-the-librem-5-dev-ki...

Here's KiCAD files for their development boards:
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/dvk-mx8m-bsb

OpenMoko someone?

Herve5 — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 13:06:36 +0000

Anyone here remembering OpenMoko phones?
Go figure, I still own one. THAT was the very beginnings : even simple calls were at risk of crashing the OS, the GPS (indeed, the only one fully opent at the time) needed 5mn to converge...
But it was open from top to bottom, to the extent that some years ago I still found a complete screen package to replace my broken one...

(on Fairphone)

Herve5 — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 13:02:40 +0000

Incidentally, I find the Fairphone 3 specs twice better than the Purism on almost all criteria (for a similar 'high' price, fully acceptable to me).
I for one am waiting the open OSes versions on Fairphones; there are a number, and in both previous versions they were efficiently supported by Fairphone themselves.
I own a Fairphone 1 (GApps-free and rooted by default android) and a FP2 (similar). I see reasonable progress in SailfishOS on Fairphones too, although there is no option where it'd come delivered straight in the package...
I'd love to see a feature-to-feature comparison between Purism, Sailfish OSes and, yes, also a GApps-free rooted android...

Google maps -> openstreetmap

Herve5 — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 12:54:29 +0000

I concur with the above, all the more that OSM maps are more and more considered now even for little apps (of course, my GPS software is the open OSMand even on android phones)

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

spaetz — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 11:06:27 +0000

> 699 USD. It’s as expensive as iPhone 11, but with worse specs. Thank you, next.
If Spec/$ is your thing, this phone is not for you, so no need to complain. This is a small batch of phones for the privacy-emphasizers. If we have learned one thing from OpenMoko, the Ubuntuphone, the N770, the KDE phone the Fairphone,... it is that phone hardware has incredible economies of scale and that vendors just aren't that interested to make special arrangements for small batch customers (surprise).
Therefore choosing components that run with free drivers will involve oldish components, more expensive components, duplicate components (the Librem will have 2 GPS chips, for instance, with one of them disabled as it sits in the uncontrollable baseband modem) and excessive levels of modularity to isolate components (radio modem as a m2 card).
I, for example, am willing to make that tradeoff and consider it to be a good deal. So no need to sound disparaging here....
Thanks.

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

diegor — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 10:29:07 +0000

If you depends on google maps, probably you don't really care about software freedom on you phone, so I don't see the problem. Just buy a normal android phone.

I mean, google map is not free software at all, what's the point to have a free software phone, if you need it to just run proprietary software?

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

mfuzzey — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 09:44:21 +0000

Yes, for the TET-N300 wifi dongle I don't see how they justify the price.

It's a stock TP-Link dongle that benefits from all the economies of scale during manufacturing, then reflashed and rebranded.
Of course it costs a bit more for that work but their price is pretty ridiculous.

However, for the main subject of the article, the Librem 5, economies of scale very much *are* relevant.

The I.MX8 is in a completely different market to the smartphone socs. It is designed for things like automotive use where the product lifecycles are much longer and the volumes lower (many people change phones every couple of years, cars far less often).
It is probably also less price sensitive, cars being far more expensive than phones.

However hope may come in the form of a slow down in the pace of development of smartphone devices. Already the core CPU capabilities are no longer improving exponentially with each product generation as they were a few years ago.

With break neck development speed and a product lifecycle of 2 years max getting the hardware properly supported upstream was well down the priority list for the manufacturers.
That may change in a slower paced market.

And even if the manufacturers don't change it will at least make reverse engineering more worthwhile if the results are going to be usable for years.

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

Karellen — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 23:13:50 +0000

> probably a lot of people (like me) started using free operating systems on their computers because they weren’t as expensive as proprietary ones.

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.

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

seneca6 — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 22:12:42 +0000

> Worst thing is, probably a lot of people (like me) started using free operating systems on their computers because they weren’t as expensive as proprietary ones.

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.

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

jfred — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 15:46:54 +0000

That modem is removable (so it could be replaced in the future if there were a free option), it can run with entirely free software on the main processor, and the goal is for all of the necessary kernel changes to be mainlined. None of those are true for your average mass-market smartphone, and they're all huge improvements over the status quo as far as software freedom is concerned.

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

excors — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 11:01:35 +0000

> 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.

It's not just about economies of scale, it's also about component selection. The i.MX8M is apparently around $40. The modem (at least the Gemalto version) is maybe around $60. The wifi module is around $30. The GPS chip is $10. As the article notes, all of those chips combined provide roughly similar features and performance to a Qualcomm 215 SoC - and that's designed for phones where the *entire* phone costs $75, so the SoC itself is presumably just a few dollars. If they sold a million of these phones, they'd still be uncompetitively priced.

I suspect the only way to be competitively priced while still being free is if you're so huge (like, Apple-sized) that you can either pressure component vendors like Qualcomm to support your goal of freedom, or you can develop all the components in-house. Otherwise you're going to be restricting yourself to a tiny subset of the components available on the market, which won't leave you any room to optimise for price.

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

Deleted user 129183 — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 10:48:19 +0000

> You're completely ignoring the economies of scale which apply to manufacturing hardware

How economies of scale are relevant here? TET-N300 isn’t some kind of custom device, it’s stock TP-Link dongle with a massively gouged price and different logo slapped on it.

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

bredelings — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 10:34:57 +0000

> "Purism actually couldn't find an open provider for the cellular modem, so the best it could do was isolate it from the rest of the system in an M.2 slot."

That's too bad. I was a bit surprised that there are open cellular modems given some success on the base stations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBTS).

> "Evergreen," due in Q2 2020, sounds like the final version of this phone, and it will be the first version with a mass-produced "molded case." All the other models will have an "individually milled case."
Perhaps the phone price will drop a bit once they get the design standardized. Maybe this is only possible because they have enough income from their laptop line to fund the development?

>There are already plans for a "Fir" batch in Q4 2020, which features an upgraded "14nm Next Generation CPU" and "Mechanical Design: Version 2.
And this should be a bit faster, if it gets beyond "plans".

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

jrigg — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 10:30:46 +0000

> I find those comments somewhat disturbing.

As do I.

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

smurf — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 10:28:08 +0000

No it's not. You gotta start *somewhere*.
As the Fairphone people continue to demonstrate, this does have at least some effect.
Even if it didn't, the alternative is not even trying. Not for me, that.

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

jrigg — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 10:03:33 +0000

> It makes a total disservice to the free software movement, making it a thing only for rich hipsters

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.

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

Cyberax — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 07:30:48 +0000

How is a device that is produced in the same authoritarian country from the same chips that have closed-source baseband with who knows how many holes any more free than the newest Galaxy S?

It's basically all just grandstanding.