(Warning: Am only a software/product engineer, playing dilettante here, not an actual marketing/business expert.)

Awhile back, I was thinking that one pragmatic way to get this viable Linux smartphone moving might be for hobbyists to focus on getting one easily available, affordable device working fully with pure Debian or PostmarketOS (no closed drivers or other modules, and preferably no blobs) and with Purism's Phosh.

Then that would boost contributions to, and demand for, Purism's open source platform/components for Librem 5 (and whatever the successor hardware would be).

If the cheap hardware is something like PinePhone, I'm just going to handwave that maybe this device won't cannibalize much sales of Purism's premium devices, but instead the community investment into the platform will effectively generate much higher net demand for Purism's premium products. With higher volume, Purism could maybe also hit more accessible price points.

If the Purism hardware demand happens, then there may be competing hardware entrants. And they will have to compete partly on being trustworthy and aligned with the interests of the kinds of customer who want to run a non-Apple, non-Google device. Where Purism should have a head start in credibility and goodwill. The new entrants will have to contribute engineer time (possibly: pay community contractors) to getting their device to work well with this platform, and be expected to upstream all of it as open source to the platform mainline, if they want to be attractive to these customers.

(I'm not saying the cheap device has to be PinePhone; that just seemed the most likely one at the time. It could even be something like an older popular Pixel model, with many unlockable-bootloader units available cheap on eBay, for which people are able to assemble/develop open source drivers. Or maybe GrapheneOS will get their own device built, and it can also be used for this non-Android-based open Linux platform.)

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Telaneo 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> to focus on getting one easily available, affordable device working fully with pure Debian or PostmarketOS (no closed drivers or other modules, and preferably no blobs) and with Purism's Phosh.

I'm not sure how viable this is. Linux phones already opt for hardware that's as open as possible, i.e. they use parts with the most open documentation and drives, but the trade-off to that is that those parts are functionally already end-of-life when they're in the phone, either because it's an old design that's been opened up to squeeze a bit more money out of an old design, or the design was third-rate to begin with. Not to mention that the baseband side of things is closed no matter what, so the phone that's completely true to the FOSS ideals seems impossible to make no matter what. And who would buy a phone with a third-rate chip and battery life? And since very few people buy them, prices aren't able to drop any significant amount.

I understand why people aren't willing to make a devils bargain in order to make a decent phone first, and then put Linux on it second, but I can't see any other way for this to happen, other than the phone market magically becoming more open somehow. If you could install Linux on any phone, since all the drivers are already out there, then we wouldn't be in this pickle, but every single Android phone out there has a different set of drivers and very few of them are open and possible to implement without an enormous amount of work, unlike the PC world, were at this point, only the really weird stuff (and Wifi from certain vendors) doesn't have some form of Linux driver.

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neilv 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IIUC, there have been some efforts to compartmentalize/isolate closed baseband, when you can work on the hardware.

Separate from baseband, the (sub)device closed firmware blobs are non-ideal, and eventually you'd want open source even for those, but maybe don't have to be a high priority. Mainlined open source for corresponding drivers are much higher priority. Even Debian now tolerates such blobs.)

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salawat 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why is the baseband closed? That is the question we need to have answered.

	▲	pabs3 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It doesn't have to be, the PinePhone's modem runs a proprietary Linux distro, which you can replace with an open source Linux distro. That is only the ARM processor of it though, the Hexagon one is all proprietary. https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk/
	▲	monocasa 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		A bajillion reasons, including that carriers basically white list basebands they're willing to interact with, and the patent situation means you only have a handful of baseband OEMs and they view their whole business model as building as big of a moat around their IP as possible.
	▲	tsimionescu 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Ultimately, it all stems from two things - for one, it's illegal to emit radio waves without a special permit. And secondly, it's also extremely hard to process radio signals at the kind of rates we expect today. Together, these facts make it so that (competitive) wireless modems require organized businesses to create, and organized businesses don't want to share their code with competitors. A foundation dedicated to creating open hardware and software for a competitive wireless modem would face giant hurdles both in regulatory terms, and in hiring people who can actually work on this extremely difficult technical challenge. Also, building an open source software for controlling wireless modems that complies with the law is probably not fully possible. Per law, to sell a wireless device, you as the manufacturer are responsible for taking reasonable precautions against users misusing it to emit in reserved bands, or to not respect military device priority in the allowed bands. If every user is extended the rights and documentation for modifying the software as they see fit, you're clearly not taking reasonable precautions to prevent them from breaking the law.
	▲	heavyset_go 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ask the FCC https://www.infoq.com/news/2015/07/FCC-Blocks-Open-Source/

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pessimizer 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would honestly just prefer that they use some semi-crap Chinese phone that is running on well-documented stuff a generation or four behind. If you could get Linux on a $50 phone, whoever was shipping them would sell 100K units. People would buy them just out of curiosity.

I'm behind though: aren't the UIs for mobile Linux still bad? I still can't get the experience I got out of my N900 that had only 256M of RAM, right? Every project I remember to bring the Maemo experience to Linux seemed to wither because there was ho hardware.

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neilv 14 hours ago | parent [-]

In one of my Linux handheld attempts, I looked to evaluate Maemo for the vintage Nokia N810 and N900 as a starting point, but much of open source artifacts (code, docs, forums) had mostly disappeared, even from where there seemed an effort to preserve/migrate.

(But someone's copy of some of it might have resurfaced now; I haven't looked recently.)

Usually things like this disappear because whoever was paying for hosting for them (company, accounting unit within a company, or some random techie's basement) gets shut down. And maybe no one who had the interest and ability was able to preserve it in time, and archive.org hadn't picked it up. But occasionally, things get deleted with intention to suppress them.

	▲	Nursie 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sailfish is the successor. Their core is apparently based on Mer which was a reconstruction of Meego, which was what came after Maemo, merging it with Moblin, IIRC. It's a bit tenuous, but you might want to look at Sailfish as carrying the torch in that area.