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Comment by sgeisler | Hacker News Reader

As someone who backed them in 2017 I'm so happy to finally see the specs. It's amazing to follow their progress, I love what they are doing with Gnome/Phosh, that gives me hope that there will be many native apps for the most important tasks and not just some web-app mess.

For the people complaining about the price/specs ratio: this phone is no standard off-the-shelve system, it had to be designed with user privacy and openness in mind while having a ridiculously small market. I'm amazed they did it so cheaply.

Personally I hope that they will be able to sell enough to continue development. Maybe this will lead to a second generation with multiple models for different market segments. I'd love a librem phone with a good old blackberry keyboard in the <1500$ price range with a little more RAM/CPU power and screws holding the back plate.

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I'd go even a step further: Since they open-sourced all their work, maybe other vendors can pick up / fork where they left off and we may actually have more than one Linux phone in the future!

Two years ago that seemed like wishful thinking to me, but I am very excited about how far Purism got in an even shorter timespan.

> fork

It'll probably be a closed source fork. Defeating the whole purpose of Librem.

I think the Librem5 will have a CC-by-SA 4.0 license, aka copyleft, so it'd have to be open source.

That's a weird statement. Why would they use a CC license, rather than a software license like the GPL?

Have you read the GPL? It makes very little sense for hardware (it’s actually a pretty weird license full of all kinds of software specific things. “Linking” to “operating system components” for example doesn’t make them a derivative work, whatever all that means. There’s quite a lot of other stuff.)

The argument for using the GPL when creating copyleft software is that most copyleft software uses the GPL and you want everything to have a compatible license, that’s not really the case for hardware.

GNOME and Linux are under the GPL. So are phosh (Purism's shell), Chatty (their messaging app) and probably a lot of other components. So you can't make a closed fork.

Linux kernel is GPL.

Now try to get the right version sold with an Android phone.

It often seems to take some persistence, but typically it is possible to get the kernel sources. The manufacturers can drag their feet for a while but ultimately they have to give it to you.

Compare that to the rest of the software on an Android device; you'll have no luck convincing Samsung to give you the source to any of the UI bits on their phones, for example.

The GPL is a huge improvement in this regard.

Semi-related, but apparently Win10 WSL now includes the Linux kernel.

Being as that's GPL, it seems strange the GPL license isn't somehow "virally" infecting windows, making other things OSS.

They have released the source for their fork: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.

Linux specifically does not use the GPLv3 for exactly this reason. rms et al. complained about "tivoization", which came from tivo shipping boxes that contained the code but were locked down. Linus didn't really care as much, or at least not enough to re-license. He didn't like the restriction, and new that such a provision would prevent exactly what MS is now doing: allowing more freedom for the users.

Thanks, that's useful info. :)

That's orthogonal though. WSL would be fine even with GPLv3. It runs on a hypervisor. WSL poses no restrictions on modifying the source of the kernel. You can fork, rebuild and run. You can't on a tivo device.

Not exactly. Microsoft is trying to expand functionality in certain places to allow things like CUDA acceleration, AF_PACKET support, and other important hardware-y things that WSL can't handle. You're right that you can run a different kernel, but Microsoft has modified theirs for WSL. For that reason, they have to release modifications.

It's usually quite easy, they're often on Github though some companies host them themselves. There are a few companies (looking at you Lenovo) who release partial/non-working sources but most vendors do comply with the GPL.

https://github.com/nokia-dev/android_device_nokia_sdm660-com...

https://github.com/OnePlusOSS/android_kernel_oneplus_sdm845

https://github.com/MiCode/Xiaomi_Kernel_OpenSource

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/ZenFone/ZS630KL/ASUS_I01W...

https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-9.0.0_...

https://consumer.huawei.com/en/opensource/

etc.

> > fork

> It'll probably be a closed source fork. Defeating the whole purpose of Librem.

wouldn't that also defeat sales too?

might not, system76 comes off like purism and sells well, but I believe they have hardware that requires binary blobs.

Like PinePhone? They're pushing for a ~$200 phone in Q3 this year, same as Purism. The difference is that Pine64 doesn't seem to be putting nearly as many resources into development, just enough to get functioning hardware out there and then leaving it up to the community to build the ecosystem.

It's an exciting time! While I'm waiting, I'm setting up my own PBX to hopefully take control of my phone service, and I'm going to experiment with using VOIP over data instead of going over the "regular" voice channels.

I'm super excited to see what's possible with an open platform like this.

Isn't Pine64 also compromising security more than Purism by being more lenient regarding unfree blobs?

Having set up a PBX before, what does it give you that allows you to "take control"? You've still got to connect to some phone provider. It's basically just a highly-configurable alternative.

> I'd love a librem phone with a good old blackberry keyboard

If the form factor is anything like Blackberry Priv, I'd order is instantly

"For the people complaining about the price/specs ratio: this phone is no standard off-the-shelve system, it had to be designed with user privacy and openness in mind while having a ridiculously small market. I'm amazed they did it so cheaply."

How does that affect the price tag? Would it be less secure if they charged less?

Well, using an off-the shelf system like many of the cheap smartphone companies do allow you to keep development costs down, and leverage economies of scale even for small batches.

For one, they are bringing up a stack that's quite different from the one usually found on smartphones, which sounds quite costly.

From the security point of view, I am not sure it would be less secure on the sw side, but it would be less open. On the hw side, they have kill switches, isolated the firmware on ROM chips (RYF-compliant), and have a pretty strict security-first approach.

Unfortunately that places it out of reach for me, financially-speaking. I'll continue with postmarketos, and keep an eye on the pinephone.

> How does that affect the price tag? Would it be less secure if they charged less?

Price = cost of goods sold (hardware) + (profit + development overhead + marketing + ...) / number of units sold

So, yes, if they didn’t bother spending r&d resources on security, they could charge less.

Also, the marginal price of security is much higher than with the big two, since the number of units sold is smaller.

I wish them well, but they picked a tough fight.

Isn't it mostly all off the shelf hardware and software though?

I think they're going to discover that a lot of people say they want security but when push comes to shove when they're buying a phone they first and foremost want a good phone. If you were really bothered about security and privacy on a phone you'd just use tracking blockers, a disposable (google) account, not log into facebook, turn off location, use tor, or existing encrypted chat software to talk to other people who are also using disposable (ie not their main email accounts to sign up to google) accounts etc. But do all this on a regular phone. I'd always been concerned about timely security updates, software that's been written by people with no experience with security and who have no reputation to damage by cutting corners.

If you constrain yourself to non-NDA hardware, rather than lowest-cost vendor, you've just notched up price quite a bit. Take out mass manufacturing economics, and the price seems quite economical, actually.

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