They are likely to fail because they are under capitalized for what they are trying to do.
The manufacturing processes to produce a decent phone are fiendishly complex. The cost of equipment to do basic quality assurance of the hardware stretch into the millions of dollars.
If (and it's a HUGE if) they are able to ship, it's because they will have put all their trust into their manufacturer, and the manufacturer that built the product for them delivered.
> One of the big tasks of our software and design teams, working with our partners (GNOME, KDE, Matrix, Nextcloud, and Monero), will be to create a proper User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) for a phone screen.
No it's not. They should lay off all those people and spend all the money on QA / testing hw iterations. The strategy should be to try to spend the $2M as miserly as possible, until they have something that looks like a phone and passes a crapload of software QA tests. For what they have and because their prospects of raising vc cash are dim, burning 150K/month on ui & framework building is not a good strategy.
The i.MX6 CPU is, by the way, the CPU that is used in the opensource Novena laptop. Apparently it is a reasonably powerful processor, but more importantly, it doesn't require an NDA to access the datasheet.
I am not sure how things will be for the i.MX8, but I certainly hope that they will continue this practice.
I'm excited to see how this goes. I've been lamenting to friends of late how I don't feel there is anyone out there innovating on hardware/software to compete with the likes of Apple/MS/Google, but I see a ray of hope in puri.sm.
IMO, Purism's biggest innovation is their business plan, they're profitable selling a small number of phones. The Ubuntu Edge failed their crowdfunding campaign with $12M pledged; the Purism succeeded with $2.5M.
The business plans of Nokia, OpenMoko, Firefox and Ubuntu all depended on selling millions of phones. Built on the ashes of those efforts, Purism appears to have a viable business plan making good profits selling many thousands.
I wish them success. I didn't back it personally though, since hardware projects are very risky. Even Jolla tablet failed, and as a backer I'm still waiting for my money back. Mobile handsets are a whole level harder to make than tablets. But I'll surely buy Librem 5 once it will come out.
On a side note, when will they add etnaviv to Mesa's features.txt? So far it can't be shown in Mesa matrix: https://mesamatrix.net
I'm similarly worried about it not working out in the end (perhaps because they have my money now!), but the part that most gives me hope is that these guys have already worked out how to run a successful open hardware business at lower quantities. Given the terrible track record of others trying this route, that business knowledge seems very valuable. I remain hopeful and excited :)
I bought my purism laptop back in mid October and it still hasn’t been shipped yet. I can’t imagine the timeline for something that doesn’t have a processor picked out yet.
Has Purism allocated the resources necessary to both reverse-engineer the Vivante GC7000Lite and provide a fully working set of free software drivers for it?
Seems to me there would be lots of organizations out there, like corporations, that are deathly afraid of spying and hacking, and would love to be able to buy something like this.
I sincerely hope this project continues to forge ahead! But, I'm wondering if any thought is being given to the development of 5G devices by Purism, or is that milestone for the market still a ways off?
5G isn't even standardized, let alone having networks and devices ready for production. That's a ludicrous thing for the Librem 5 team to be concerned about.
From our contact from the Etnaviv developers we know that they are heavily working on the i.MX8M support so we can expect that Etnaviv will be working on it within the year.
What exactly are people funding Librem for if not to actually work on the most crucial component, the GPU driver?
I guess it doesn't really matter because if they want to have any hope of delivering they will be knee deep into Mesa and DRM before they know it. This isn't a blob you just copy into /vendor.
But their lax attitude kind of spells doom for the chances of this crowdfunding project.
Edit: whoops, they don't even want to use Android! But judging from their mockup renders they expect to have something just as good.
> Edit: whoops, they don't even want to use Android! But judging from their mockup renders they expect to have something just as good.
Their mockup renders were with actual software – the KDE and Gnome desktops already support mobile natively, and there’s more and more software for these environments available as well.
Maybe you want to read their crowdfunding page and homepage, because not being an android phone is the point from the start, so I'm not sure why you seem surprised :)
It's not the first attempt, either. Before them, there has been (in no particular order) firefox OS, ubuntu phone (Unity was initially meant as a "responsive" environment for mobile, laptop and desktop), QT mobile and maybe others. For a long time, opensource leaders wanted to build a "true" linux mobile OS, this is just a new step on that road, and I hope this will finally be a successful one.
I'm not sure why you consider it to be an impossible challenge, the hard part in building a new OS was building its kernel and coreutils, and this has been solved for about 30 years. Now, it needs to be adapted for mobile specificity.
That's the point. No Android. They aren't going to make a whole new OS, they are using Linux but with conventional glibc and graphics stack (Mesa / Wayland). They are relying on Etnaviv: https://github.com/etnaviv
That's a good thing. There is more than enough Android around already, we need proper Wayland based mobile Linux with open drivers, that also works on a decent usable device (and that it's privacy respectful is a huge bonus too).
Jolla for example never opened up their SailfishOS despite multiple promises (it's just too hard and not a priority for them). So Librem 5 can be that option at last.
Whilst I understand the need to make some bespoke UI components, I hope they don't get too much not-invented-here syndrome.
OpenMoko went down that route: the Freerunner shipped with a bespoke GTK UI (with support from Gnome; I seem to remember them being at GUADEC) but they'd already deprecated it in favour of a bespoke EFL UI. This meant a huge amount of churn, resulting in multiple half-finished projects, rather than a single reasonably-decent UI.
For the last 10 years my Freerunner has been running on 'qtmoko', which is just Debian with the QtMobile UI (which AFAIK was a Trolltech demo).
These days there are even more FOSS mobile UIs floating around (Maemo, Meego, Plasma, Unity, FirefoxOS, Android, QtMobile, etc.) so hopefully Librem will just pick a stable OS (Debian?); pick one of these UIs, or interoperable components from a few; add on their Matrix messenger thingy, and ship.
Even if, for some reason, the flagship OS isn't polished enough on launch, there are other OS options that are. I'd argue that, from what I've seen, Ubuntu Touch is already good enough, and thanks to the UBports team it's still under development.
If you want to make a committee and decide for everybody what should or shouldn't be worked on, by all means, go ahead. Or agitate against projects online, that works too. Should be a fun for you and funny for most others.
Or you could just contribute to a project you find suitable, for whatever reason. Should be fun for everyone.
[+] [-] grizzles|8 years ago|reply
The manufacturing processes to produce a decent phone are fiendishly complex. The cost of equipment to do basic quality assurance of the hardware stretch into the millions of dollars.
If (and it's a HUGE if) they are able to ship, it's because they will have put all their trust into their manufacturer, and the manufacturer that built the product for them delivered.
> One of the big tasks of our software and design teams, working with our partners (GNOME, KDE, Matrix, Nextcloud, and Monero), will be to create a proper User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) for a phone screen.
No it's not. They should lay off all those people and spend all the money on QA / testing hw iterations. The strategy should be to try to spend the $2M as miserly as possible, until they have something that looks like a phone and passes a crapload of software QA tests. For what they have and because their prospects of raising vc cash are dim, burning 150K/month on ui & framework building is not a good strategy.
[+] [-] O_H_E|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meuk|8 years ago|reply
I am not sure how things will be for the i.MX8, but I certainly hope that they will continue this practice.
[+] [-] jesse_m|8 years ago|reply
Seems like it is available
[+] [-] revelation|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_s|8 years ago|reply
https://community.nxp.com/thread/467234 (2018-01-11) basically says NXP will work with customers privately and end users should contact their OEMs.
https://puri.sm/posts/purism-patches-meltdown-and-spectre-va... appears to only cover Intel CPUs.
[+] [-] monocasa|8 years ago|reply
Even stuff like sd card images for their dev board disappeared off their site more or less immediately after the acquisition.
[+] [-] Tepix|8 years ago|reply
I consider it to be slow and outdated.
[+] [-] nabeards|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|8 years ago|reply
The business plans of Nokia, OpenMoko, Firefox and Ubuntu all depended on selling millions of phones. Built on the ashes of those efforts, Purism appears to have a viable business plan making good profits selling many thousands.
[+] [-] rrggrr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|8 years ago|reply
On a side note, when will they add etnaviv to Mesa's features.txt? So far it can't be shown in Mesa matrix: https://mesamatrix.net
[+] [-] bonsai80|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyager|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meuk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodandsteel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 24gttghh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voltagex_|8 years ago|reply
Are there any networks around yet?
[+] [-] revelation|8 years ago|reply
What exactly are people funding Librem for if not to actually work on the most crucial component, the GPU driver?
I guess it doesn't really matter because if they want to have any hope of delivering they will be knee deep into Mesa and DRM before they know it. This isn't a blob you just copy into /vendor.
But their lax attitude kind of spells doom for the chances of this crowdfunding project.
Edit: whoops, they don't even want to use Android! But judging from their mockup renders they expect to have something just as good.
[+] [-] kuschku|8 years ago|reply
Their mockup renders were with actual software – the KDE and Gnome desktops already support mobile natively, and there’s more and more software for these environments available as well.
[+] [-] craftyguy|8 years ago|reply
By not using Android, they automatically have something better.
[+] [-] IshKebab|8 years ago|reply
Yeah good luck with that.
[+] [-] oelmekki|8 years ago|reply
It's not the first attempt, either. Before them, there has been (in no particular order) firefox OS, ubuntu phone (Unity was initially meant as a "responsive" environment for mobile, laptop and desktop), QT mobile and maybe others. For a long time, opensource leaders wanted to build a "true" linux mobile OS, this is just a new step on that road, and I hope this will finally be a successful one.
I'm not sure why you consider it to be an impossible challenge, the hard part in building a new OS was building its kernel and coreutils, and this has been solved for about 30 years. Now, it needs to be adapted for mobile specificity.
[+] [-] shmerl|8 years ago|reply
That's a good thing. There is more than enough Android around already, we need proper Wayland based mobile Linux with open drivers, that also works on a decent usable device (and that it's privacy respectful is a huge bonus too).
Jolla for example never opened up their SailfishOS despite multiple promises (it's just too hard and not a priority for them). So Librem 5 can be that option at last.
[+] [-] chriswarbo|8 years ago|reply
OpenMoko went down that route: the Freerunner shipped with a bespoke GTK UI (with support from Gnome; I seem to remember them being at GUADEC) but they'd already deprecated it in favour of a bespoke EFL UI. This meant a huge amount of churn, resulting in multiple half-finished projects, rather than a single reasonably-decent UI.
For the last 10 years my Freerunner has been running on 'qtmoko', which is just Debian with the QtMobile UI (which AFAIK was a Trolltech demo).
These days there are even more FOSS mobile UIs floating around (Maemo, Meego, Plasma, Unity, FirefoxOS, Android, QtMobile, etc.) so hopefully Librem will just pick a stable OS (Debian?); pick one of these UIs, or interoperable components from a few; add on their Matrix messenger thingy, and ship.
[+] [-] ZenoArrow|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mangecoeur|8 years ago|reply
Free software, or "why do anything once when you can do it twice for twice the cost and half as good?"
[+] [-] lightdot|8 years ago|reply
Or you could just contribute to a project you find suitable, for whatever reason. Should be fun for everyone.
[+] [-] andrepd|8 years ago|reply