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I'd like them to do that too. It's a chicken/egg/bootstrapping problem. You don't get a community of developers without HW, and you don't get a useful HW running OSS OS/userspace without the community.

OTOH, I think they'll have trouble attracting that much of a community to sustain the project if they just throw out such an expensive initially useless hardware out there.

But at least people will have something to play with. Better than promisses and sorrys.

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The software needs some sort of vendor polish. Let's not repeat the mistake of OpenMoko, where its utility as a basic phone had its problems, thrown over the wall for the community to fix.

They could just ship AOSP as the default (years of polish...) as their first step.

Though this works for plenty of SBCs produced by Chinese vendors, who just slap on SoC vendor kernel on some debian userspace and that's that from the software side for them.

HW must be appealing though, even if by being dirt cheap and with plentiful options. But it still takes years for community to produce something useful.

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