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Doesn't close on a bright note: >However, the sad truth is that it looks like there is no business case anymore for a truly open platform based on custom-desig

Doesn't close on a bright note: >However, the sad truth is that it looks like there is no business case anymore for a truly open platform based on custom-designed hardware, since people refuse to spend extra money for tweakability, freedom, and security. Despite us living in times where privacy is massively endangered. If anyone out there thinks different and plans a project, please holler and get me on board!

notspanishflu 9y ago
I've hope projects like Halium, UBports, Plasma Mobile, etc end up bringing an open hardware project.
- vedanta 9y ago
  Yeah, it seems like mobile oses are about as common as Linux distros in 1995. Sailfish, Maru, lineage, among the two you mention. If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck. I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up. If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.
  - striking 9y ago
    > If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck. Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.
    - notspanishflu 9y ago
      Your best bet is to keep an eye on what Halium Project[+] choose as its reference phones. [+] https://halium.org/ https://halium.org/
      - internet2000 9y ago
        What's the difference between Halium and Mer? They both seem to be similar projects.
        petecox 9y ago
        Packaging. If I understand correctly, Halium's goals are simpler in just doing enough to bootstrap the libhybris layer. This allows projects such as Mer, Plasma Mobile, LuneOS, UBports and AsteroidOS etc to pool efforts without any distro-specific assumptions.
      - Tepix 9y ago
        Currently it's the Nexus 5.
    - Tepix 9y ago
      Depends on how open you want to be. Is CopperheadOS open enough for you? Then get a Nexus 5x/6P or a Pixel with the OS preinstalled.
      - vedanta 9y ago
        Yep, Lineage is available on a 5X, Samsung S7, LG G5, etc.. Libhybris/Halium uses the driver parts of AOSP if I understand correctly, and Lineage uses ART in addition, they are all dependent on AOSP in some way currently atleast. Google's project treble might make haliums' job a bit easier, so you might see halium on more devices than you'd think. Just speculating.
lallysingh 9y ago
No, that wasn't it. I had the 2nd-gen openmoko phone. It just didn't work. You won't get users until you have something that /does something/. I never even got a phone call made with it. The system didn't have enough of a working spine to make it worth investing time or energy into to get it further. If you want an open source project to work, it has to already work and then have easy places where people can start making changes. Otherwise, they don't know how much work is needed to get anything done, and don't want to risk weeks of work for minimal, if any, results.
- carussell 9y ago
  This is one of my most frequent criticisms about open source software. jwz wrote about it almost 20 years ago. (It can even apply to highly polished software like Android, or Signal, or Firefox today, that for one reason or another make things really difficult to work with—if you can work with them at all.) > People only really contribute when they get something out of it. When someone is first beginning to contribute, they especially need to see some kind of payback, some kind of positive reinforcement, right away. For example, if someone were running a web browser, then stopped, added a simple new command to the source, recompiled, and had that same web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to do this again, and possibly to tackle even larger projects. > We never got there. We never distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using. We didn't release the source code to the most-previous-release of Netscape Navigator: instead, we released what we had at the time, which had a number of incomplete features, and lots and lots of bugs. And of course we weren't able to release any Java or crypto code at all. > What we released was a large pile of interesting code, but it didn't much resemble something you could actually use. "nomo zilla: resignation and postmortem". 1999. https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
  - sbierwagen 9y ago
    Note that jwz redirects traffic coming from HN to an imgur photo of a testicle. To view this article, right click and choose "Open link in incognito window" or click https://anon.to/?https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html https://anon.to/?https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
digi_owl 9y ago
I think it may be a bit premature. Just look at what people are doing with RPis and various radio boards. There was one such project posted on HN recently that had a RPi Zero W hooked up to a touch screen and a mobile radio. All battery powered. In a sense the Openmoko was too early and too bespoke. Thus driving the cost of entry for would be tinkerers through the roof.
- potatolicious 9y ago
  I think it goes to the other poster's point: "You won't get users until you have something that /does something/" The RPi was ready to roll out of the gate - they had a working Linux distro from the get-go that actually worked. They also provided really simple instructions on how to get said Linux distro onto a SD card. You can boot the RPi and have it be useful within a matter of minutes. Openmoko simply never got near enough to working where the community felt like picking it up and running with it. I don't think Openmoko was premature - it was incomplete. You're not going to get much participation from the community if doing anything useful on your platform first involves fixing/finishing the platform.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    You're right. The rpi is feature complete for me. Everything works as expected. I don't have to change any of the platform or OS code. I can simply build on top. But I guess shipping a feature complete smartphone is much harder.
- petecox 9y ago
  The Pi zero phone is a cool hack but I doubt many would opt to use it as a 'daily driver'. Broadcom, according to the wikipedia page for VideoCore, did however make a couple of Cortex-A9/A7 SoCs that made their way into low end 2012-3 era Android phones. Perhaps a startup might recycle old Broadcom-based HTC and Samsung models in collaboration with the RPi team.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Perhaps. Thing is though that by bring a generic stack of boards, it does not live or die by that one project. A RPiZ with a mobile data connection but no screen is still a potential IoT platform etc. Openmoko with its bespoke board lived or died by how well it performed as a phone.

notspanishflu 9y ago

I've hope projects like Halium, UBports, Plasma Mobile, etc end up bringing an open hardware project.

vedanta 9y ago
Yeah, it seems like mobile oses are about as common as Linux distros in 1995. Sailfish, Maru, lineage, among the two you mention. If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck. I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up. If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.
- striking 9y ago
  > If you have a nexus 5 or one plus one, you're in luck. Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.
  - notspanishflu 9y ago
    Your best bet is to keep an eye on what Halium Project[+] choose as its reference phones. [+] https://halium.org/ https://halium.org/
    - internet2000 9y ago
      What's the difference between Halium and Mer? They both seem to be similar projects.
      - petecox 9y ago
        Packaging. If I understand correctly, Halium's goals are simpler in just doing enough to bootstrap the libhybris layer. This allows projects such as Mer, Plasma Mobile, LuneOS, UBports and AsteroidOS etc to pool efforts without any distro-specific assumptions.
    - Tepix 9y ago
      Currently it's the Nexus 5.
  - Tepix 9y ago
    Depends on how open you want to be. Is CopperheadOS open enough for you? Then get a Nexus 5x/6P or a Pixel with the OS preinstalled.
    - vedanta 9y ago
      Yep, Lineage is available on a 5X, Samsung S7, LG G5, etc.. Libhybris/Halium uses the driver parts of AOSP if I understand correctly, and Lineage uses ART in addition, they are all dependent on AOSP in some way currently atleast. Google's project treble might make haliums' job a bit easier, so you might see halium on more devices than you'd think. Just speculating.

lallysingh 9y ago

No, that wasn't it. I had the 2nd-gen openmoko phone. It just didn't work. You won't get users until you have something that /does something/. I never even got a phone call made with it. The system didn't have enough of a working spine to make it worth investing time or energy into to get it further. If you want an open source project to work, it has to already work and then have easy places where people can start making changes. Otherwise, they don't know how much work is needed to get anything done, and don't want to risk weeks of work for minimal, if any, results.

carussell 9y ago
This is one of my most frequent criticisms about open source software. jwz wrote about it almost 20 years ago. (It can even apply to highly polished software like Android, or Signal, or Firefox today, that for one reason or another make things really difficult to work with—if you can work with them at all.) > People only really contribute when they get something out of it. When someone is first beginning to contribute, they especially need to see some kind of payback, some kind of positive reinforcement, right away. For example, if someone were running a web browser, then stopped, added a simple new command to the source, recompiled, and had that same web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to do this again, and possibly to tackle even larger projects. > We never got there. We never distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using. We didn't release the source code to the most-previous-release of Netscape Navigator: instead, we released what we had at the time, which had a number of incomplete features, and lots and lots of bugs. And of course we weren't able to release any Java or crypto code at all. > What we released was a large pile of interesting code, but it didn't much resemble something you could actually use. "nomo zilla: resignation and postmortem". 1999. https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
- sbierwagen 9y ago
  Note that jwz redirects traffic coming from HN to an imgur photo of a testicle. To view this article, right click and choose "Open link in incognito window" or click https://anon.to/?https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html https://anon.to/?https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

digi_owl 9y ago

I think it may be a bit premature. Just look at what people are doing with RPis and various radio boards. There was one such project posted on HN recently that had a RPi Zero W hooked up to a touch screen and a mobile radio. All battery powered. In a sense the Openmoko was too early and too bespoke. Thus driving the cost of entry for would be tinkerers through the roof.

potatolicious 9y ago
I think it goes to the other poster's point: "You won't get users until you have something that /does something/" The RPi was ready to roll out of the gate - they had a working Linux distro from the get-go that actually worked. They also provided really simple instructions on how to get said Linux distro onto a SD card. You can boot the RPi and have it be useful within a matter of minutes. Openmoko simply never got near enough to working where the community felt like picking it up and running with it. I don't think Openmoko was premature - it was incomplete. You're not going to get much participation from the community if doing anything useful on your platform first involves fixing/finishing the platform.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  You're right. The rpi is feature complete for me. Everything works as expected. I don't have to change any of the platform or OS code. I can simply build on top. But I guess shipping a feature complete smartphone is much harder.
petecox 9y ago
The Pi zero phone is a cool hack but I doubt many would opt to use it as a 'daily driver'. Broadcom, according to the wikipedia page for VideoCore, did however make a couple of Cortex-A9/A7 SoCs that made their way into low end 2012-3 era Android phones. Perhaps a startup might recycle old Broadcom-based HTC and Samsung models in collaboration with the RPi team.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Perhaps. Thing is though that by bring a generic stack of boards, it does not live or die by that one project. A RPiZ with a mobile data connection but no screen is still a potential IoT platform etc. Openmoko with its bespoke board lived or died by how well it performed as a phone.