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Comment by cookiengineer | Hacker News Reader

This is really a nice product, but I won't order it unless SolOS and its firmware and drivers are open sourced.

I've probably spent far more than 8000 bucks over the years for devices like this, only to have to throw them away eventually because their software got abandoned and they've been so proprietary that they can only function as an expensive brick on the shelf.

If the software is closed source, I'd recommend everyone to stay away from any product like this. It is a deal breaker for me now, and it took a lot of cash and hype to realize it.

Products like this are not a mainstream product, which makes them high risk for their investors. And you have to minimize risk by demanding open source.

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While fully open would of course be ideal, I'd settle for an unlockable bootloader.

I'm guessing whatever random extras "SolOS" grafts onto Android are probably fairly extraneous, and any vanilla AOSP-based ROM would be perfectly cromulent, provided it was possible to flash it in the first place.

Founder said they’d be releasing a bootloader, fwiw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40458954

I am not sure you are aware how many years of development time are necessary to reverse engineer a driver on mobile platforms.

For me that is where I draw the line, without drivers I won't touch it. I've wasted enough of my free time trying to get Cyanogen run on fucked up proprietary platforms.

If the drivers aren't open source, the company won't give a damn about the platform anyways because they already did not comply with the law of the license of the tools they stole (read as: linux kernel license) already.

I think you're missing out. A different perspective is to just see these devices as temporary and enjoy them for as long as they last. Let's say you can expect 2 years from the device, and it costs $480. That's $20/mo - maybe that's worth it or maybe it's not for any particular device. But at least you can make the choice that way.

I think this way of looking at it is valid, although I don't personally like it very much because it generates a large amount of e-waste.

Regardless, using your model on this device: it costs $725, and if you buy now, won't ship until September. So if you assume 2 years from the device starting today, that's about $35/month.

I don't know how you came up with this mentality, but its really consumer hostile IMO. You are buying a device not a service.

That's incredibly wasteful. You can't be serious?

I support this motion.

I'd definitely splurge on this bur I want to actually own the device if anything goes wrong with the company.

How about a legal commitment to open source after a delay? I think this would be a compromise that a lot of companies could accept if it would increase sales today at all.

(Ideally there'd be some way of requiring an immediate release as soon as the company loses the ability to continue maintaining or developing the software, but I'm not sure how you'd formalize that.)

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