
Librem 5 Phone Progress Report - adisbladis
https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-1/
======
grizzles
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.

~~~
O_H_E
Thoughtful quality insight, hope it turns out wrong :)

~~~
grizzles
I hope so too for their backers sake. There is another dimension to this too
that I thought of after my last post.

Their potential partners can be grouped into two categories. Companies that
have produced phones before and companies that haven't but may claim related
expertise. The former group are competitors to Purism and have a strong
economic incentive to stop the commodification of the phone platform, esp for
a relatively small payday. For the latter group, they would be essentially
funding another company's R&D process. Imo it would be a fatal mistake to
choose a fabricator that hasn't produced a phone before. It's so crazy that
the latter idea should be dismissed entirely.

------
meuk
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.

~~~
Tepix
Isnt the i.MX6 CPU comparable to the CPU in a Samsung Galaxy SIII phone?

I consider it to be slow and outdated.

~~~
squarefoot
It all depends on what software you run under it, certainly Java does not help
in this context. A few days ago I had Debian+lxde running on one of those very
small chinese mini netbooks; I can't check now what's the CPU, but it's a 300
MHz one with only 128MB RAM, and the system boots from the SD card (the laptop
comes with Win CE). I wouldn't call it snappy for sure, but it's useable.

------
nabeards
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.

~~~
bryanlarsen
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.

~~~
seba_dos1
Nokia (Maemo) - not really, it was more of a side project that worked pretty
well for them and still would with such volumes as it got. They had a chance
to turn it into something bigger, but waited for too long, playing internal
battles between Maemo and Symbian teams, so eventually Microsoft came and
pulled out the plug.

OpenMoko - not really, it was major mismanagement in other areas (and some
poor luck) that killed it, but AFAIR production volume was actually being
predicted quite well.

Firefox OS, Ubuntu Edge - sure.

~~~
nickik
Totally agree, Nokia had it in its hand to create a third option. Nokia had
lots of consumer good will, the N900 (and Maemo) was super well received
specially by developers but it could even compete against Android for normal
consumers as well.

They should have iterated on this with every flagship phone and push it to the
cheaper phones as well.

I was so sad and angry when this never came together. They just spiraled out
of control after that.

------
shmerl
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](https://mesamatrix.net)

~~~
bonsai80
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 :)

------
wyager
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.

~~~
meuk
That sucks. What did they state about the shipping up front? How has their
communication been?

~~~
orblivion
Similar story for me, I think November. I checked back in I think in December
and they told me they had run out of stock. I was told early January (well,
here we are, still waiting). On the other hand my friend ordered just before
me and she got hers pretty quick. I guess she got the last one, hah.

------
jancsika
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?

------
woodandsteel
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.

------
24gttghh
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?

~~~
voltagex_
Are there any 5G chipsets available for purchase in the quantaties Purism can
afford?

Are there any networks around yet?

~~~
thg
> Are there any networks around yet?

Estonia has one. [https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2017/9/5g-goes-live-in-
the-...](https://www.ericsson.com/en/news/2017/9/5g-goes-live-in-the-port-of-
tallinn)

And Verizon announced that they want to build 5G networks in up to 5 US cities
this year. [https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-
launch-5g-residen...](https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-
launch-5g-residential-broadband-services-5-markets-2018)

------
revelation
_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.

~~~
kuschku
> 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.

------
IshKebab
Wait, so they're not using Android? They're going to try and make their own
phone OS?!

Yeah good luck with that.

~~~
oelmekki
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.

~~~
ilikethiscmnt
I think it's worth asking ourselves if the hard part is _really_ the kernel
and coreutils if as you say it's been a solved problem for 30 years.

~~~
oelmekki
I guess I should have said "the hardest part" :) I don't mean to make ARM devs
and mobile UI interfacers work look casual.

------
mangecoeur
> collaboration with GNOME and KDE

Free software, or "why do anything once when you can do it twice for twice the
cost and half as good?"

~~~
andrepd
Yeah, who needs choice! Let's appoint someone to decide for everyone. Are you
available?

~~~
mangecoeur
Not that this singular comment is going to help reform free software culture
anytime soon, but this business of choice needs to be examined a bit. Simply
adding more choices is not an advantage by itself. Have 10 choices which are
all bad is not better than having 1 bad option.

In the case of free software, there is a limited resource of people's time and
skills. Adding more choices means spreading that resource more thinly - you
basically make things worse by having more choices.

Sadly the community is more fractious even than most political landscapes, so
the probability of convergence and de-duplication of effort is basically zero
and the linux desktop will always be a bit half-baked.

~~~
davidcuddeback
> Have 10 choices which are all bad is not better than having 1 bad option.

But having 10 _good_ choices is clearly better than having 1 good choice, and
that's closer to what my experience with FOSS has been.

~~~
drdaeman
> But having 10 good choices is clearly better

Not exactly.

tl;dr: Even if separate Lego pieces are really _good_ by themselves, it's _no
good_ if you can't stack them together effortlessly.

\------

The problem I see with GNU/Linux ecosystem is incompatibility issues. There
are many ways to do one thing, but all of them are incompatible (completely or
to a significant extent) with each other.

This is how modern GNU/Linux desktop is a Frankensten's monster made from ton
of software pieces somehow glued together with duct tape and compatibility
adapters. No consistency, every app works differently etc etc. There are
higher-tier projects that try to unify different lower-level modules (e.g.
NetworkManager or PulseAudio), but then something still relies on something
else, like distro-specific stuff like ifup or netctl or wants raw ALSA, etc
etc. Really, it's a mess, and even though I like GNU/Linux as my desktop it's
sometimes quite painful to make it "just work", hoping for some sane levels of
consistency.

I know, this is not about desktops but it's just most visible there. The
actual point is, too many different incompatible implementations lead to
integration fatigue. Or frustration because you have to make sacrifices (get
either this or that but not both).

This problem is by no means unique or specific to GNU/Linux or FOSS, but it's
most visible there.

~~~
davidcuddeback
> Even if separate Lego pieces are really good by themselves, it's no good if
> you can't stack them together effortlessly.

I think that's unnecessarily splitting hairs. Compatibility factors into being
a good choice. You can cherry-pick counter-examples, and no one's denying that
those exist. My experience (almost 20 years) with FOSS has been overwhelmingly
positive.

