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>open source smartphone hardware is not a thing that existed before now See, this is something I really dislike about the Librem 5 - they are pretty much tryin

>open source smartphone hardware is not a thing that existed before now See, this is something I really dislike about the Librem 5 - they are pretty much trying to rewrite history to pain themselves in a better light. "We are the first ones tryin to do this, no one ever tried before, so all those bad decissions we did that make our phone unusable are not our fault!" This is of course incorrect, as they totally fail to mention the Neo FreeRunner project, a open source smartphone from ~2009: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner I've had it and many issues it had pretty much mirror the issues Librem 5 is having at the moment - problematic hardware component, buggy calling and issues with power management. Mybe thats why Purism fails to mention it, to hide the fact they managed to repicate the mistakes 10 years later ? Still even http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunnerwith http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunnerwith all its faults the Neo FreeRunner pretty much jumpstarted the open mobile community, with many of its users then bein involved in the Maemo and Sailfish OS communities and now with the Pinephone or Fxtec Pro1. For that reason it makes me sad how Purism fails to mention the Neo FreeRunner & paint themselves as being first. It's really rude to all the hard work the open mobile community did since then & that they are heavilly building on.

Multicomp 7y ago
> Foxtex Pro Do you get autocorrected from Fxtec Pro1 ? I've not heard of Foxtex, ducking for it appears to show speakers and monitors, but not phones.
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Indeed, made a typo here, fixed. :)
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
Neither Maemo nor Sailfish were "open mobile" in terms of hardware. They ran on the same kind of commodity mobile-phone hardware fraught with privacy risks as any mainstream phone, and the appeal of Librem has been that its design was going to overcome that. Also, while the software on Maemo and Sailfish devices was mostly open and hackable, the actual UI layer and some of the stock apps were closed-source.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  I think Sailfish had a proprietary UI component, but Maemo (and its derivatives Meego, Moblin and Mer) was wholly open except for the usual kernel/driver issues that are pretty much ubiquitous in embedded land.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    No, some of the Nokia UI components on the N900 were closed-source. There was a community project to gradually write Free Software replacements for them, but it never completely covered what was provided by Nokia packages.
seba_dos1 7y ago
I work for Purism. I have no control over the marketing, but rest assured that the development team is well familiar with Openmoko, Maemo, Tinkerphones and plenty of other projects and communities that layed the groundwork for GNU/Linux on mobile. I have personally been one of the core developers of SHR and used my Neo Freerunner as my daily driver for years until I finally switched to Nokia N900. I don't agree with your stance about "replicating the mistakes 10 years later". The issues GTA02 had managed to make it past four earlier hardware revisions and reached the mass production (and there was even GTA01 before that!). Librem 5 isn't even mass produced yet - you had to opt in for an early development batch to receive one already. It's currently at its third revision, with the fifth one being scheduled to be the mass produced one. To be frank, so far, having the Neo Freerunner in the back of my head, I'm pretty happy with the progress on the hardware. Classifying things like power management into "repeated mistakes from the past" isn't really fair IMO. Those things just take a lot of time and effort, and taking the notes from past experiences can only smooth some edges, but won't make that work magically done for you. The hardware is capable of decent power management, as the NXP's kernel tree can show, but the mainline Linux has its power management still at its infancy. It's going to get better with time, but it's going to take that time - we can't magically skip that. There are also business constraints to consider there - it's easy to say "you should have waited with release until everything is fleshed out", but it's harder to actually finance a team of developers when you don't deliver anything for extended period of time ;)
- m4rtink 7y ago
  Cool, it's nice to see FreeRunner legacy is part of the Librem project, even if it doesnt't really look that way from the marketing side. :) As for being hard and needing multiple revisions to catch critical bugs - definitely agrew with that as well, even major manufacturers are no immune to hardware issues - Sailfish OS hit on Xperia X and likely 10 as well an issue with the proximity sensor becomming unreliable if turned on for too long. While it could still be a driver issue, given that official Android firmware has the same issues it looks more like a hardware problem Sony failed to catch. Still, even if all the current issues woth the Librem 5 can be fixed in the final revisions, we are still hitting on marketing issues in how Purism "sold" the initial batches - eq. I don't think the expectations have ever been set as getting an expensive hand warmer, rather having just a minor issues here and there and possibly a less nice chassis. In my opinion, these hardware revisions simply should not have been released to paying customers even if it would mean another delay.

Multicomp 7y ago

> Foxtex Pro Do you get autocorrected from Fxtec Pro1 ? I've not heard of Foxtex, ducking for it appears to show speakers and monitors, but not phones.

m4rtink 7y ago
Indeed, made a typo here, fixed. :)

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

Neither Maemo nor Sailfish were "open mobile" in terms of hardware. They ran on the same kind of commodity mobile-phone hardware fraught with privacy risks as any mainstream phone, and the appeal of Librem has been that its design was going to overcome that. Also, while the software on Maemo and Sailfish devices was mostly open and hackable, the actual UI layer and some of the stock apps were closed-source.

zozbot234 7y ago
I think Sailfish had a proprietary UI component, but Maemo (and its derivatives Meego, Moblin and Mer) was wholly open except for the usual kernel/driver issues that are pretty much ubiquitous in embedded land.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  No, some of the Nokia UI components on the N900 were closed-source. There was a community project to gradually write Free Software replacements for them, but it never completely covered what was provided by Nokia packages.

seba_dos1 7y ago

I work for Purism. I have no control over the marketing, but rest assured that the development team is well familiar with Openmoko, Maemo, Tinkerphones and plenty of other projects and communities that layed the groundwork for GNU/Linux on mobile. I have personally been one of the core developers of SHR and used my Neo Freerunner as my daily driver for years until I finally switched to Nokia N900. I don't agree with your stance about "replicating the mistakes 10 years later". The issues GTA02 had managed to make it past four earlier hardware revisions and reached the mass production (and there was even GTA01 before that!). Librem 5 isn't even mass produced yet - you had to opt in for an early development batch to receive one already. It's currently at its third revision, with the fifth one being scheduled to be the mass produced one. To be frank, so far, having the Neo Freerunner in the back of my head, I'm pretty happy with the progress on the hardware. Classifying things like power management into "repeated mistakes from the past" isn't really fair IMO. Those things just take a lot of time and effort, and taking the notes from past experiences can only smooth some edges, but won't make that work magically done for you. The hardware is capable of decent power management, as the NXP's kernel tree can show, but the mainline Linux has its power management still at its infancy. It's going to get better with time, but it's going to take that time - we can't magically skip that. There are also business constraints to consider there - it's easy to say "you should have waited with release until everything is fleshed out", but it's harder to actually finance a team of developers when you don't deliver anything for extended period of time ;)

m4rtink 7y ago
Cool, it's nice to see FreeRunner legacy is part of the Librem project, even if it doesnt't really look that way from the marketing side. :) As for being hard and needing multiple revisions to catch critical bugs - definitely agrew with that as well, even major manufacturers are no immune to hardware issues - Sailfish OS hit on Xperia X and likely 10 as well an issue with the proximity sensor becomming unreliable if turned on for too long. While it could still be a driver issue, given that official Android firmware has the same issues it looks more like a hardware problem Sony failed to catch. Still, even if all the current issues woth the Librem 5 can be fixed in the final revisions, we are still hitting on marketing issues in how Purism "sold" the initial batches - eq. I don't think the expectations have ever been set as getting an expensive hand warmer, rather having just a minor issues here and there and possibly a less nice chassis. In my opinion, these hardware revisions simply should not have been released to paying customers even if it would mean another delay.