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Comment by binary132 | Hacker News Reader

Something I think people in tech sometimes don’t realize is that the complexity of modern software generally requires a lot of money to be thrown at it to get meaningful amounts of stuff done, and that money is getting thrown at open source by the giants, who may have whole teams dedicated to advancing it. That means they’re the ones directing the R&D and advancing the state of the art, so your little indie/hobby/crowdfunded/grassroots thing isn’t going to be able to keep up, probably. Call me cynical, but that’s just what I seem to see right now.

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That's because you treat a FOSS project with a commercial mentality.

Remember the first post Torvalds made for the kernel?

He didn't say "I'm doing a project to compete as fast as I can with commercial UNIX machine so please help"

He sid this: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"

And it became huge. By chance.

A FOSS phone doesn't have to support Whatsapp. It should be open, fun to tinker with, modular and, maybe, with enough logic to handle carrier signal and SMS.

Even if it's not successful, the code and schematics will still live somewhere on the Internet, ready for anyone to create a weird steampunk phone.

Most people that want a Linux phone don't care about freedom of tech. They just want some portable Unix workstation with all the comfort of a commercial phone.

Which it's not wrong by itself. But demanding Open Source to create another "commercial-like but gratis" it's already a bad attitude to start with

> A FOSS phone doesn't have to support Whatsapp.

What apps does it have to support, in your opinion? A computer in my pocket is useful for a lot of things, but central to its usefulness is communication. it can choose to not support all possible modes of communication, but it needs to at least support some of them, in order for there to be any adoption.

A browser that provides PWAs if you are looking for a smart phone. An opensource app store alternative. That's how I imagine the bare minimum, but I'm not the biggest smart phone user.

I think you are missing the point.

It will support whatever forms of communication the author wants it to. I know it’s hard to believe, but mass adoption isn’t the end goal of many FOSS projects.

You are commenting in a thread titled "We need a real GNU/Linux (not Android) smartphone ecosystem", mass adoption is the foremost goal.

Matrix. Then you can have a Raspberry Pi homeserver that bridges to Whatsapp and other things.

I mean, you can already run the Linux kernel on a phone and shell in, which is why I think of a “Linux phone” as meaning a Linux based phone that’s actually usable, as opposed to a fringe hobby device…

First of all I really wish people would stop conflating nonfree open source and free software. They are as different as night and day.

Second of all, you are agreeing with me that independent software can’t compete with massive corpo sponsored projects.

All I’m saying is an indie phone isn’t going to be able to compete on the same level as devices that have billions of dollars of R&D poured into them, and people have this fantasy where the socialism of the commons will give them magic toys (after all look how successful open source projects have been!) without thinking about how all the expert hours are going to get devoted to these things, of even throwing a couple of bucks anyone’s way themselves to fund it.

Crowdsourcing can work (Ubuntu phone got $12.7 million public commitment but fell short of the goal so got nothing) but even then it’s on a whole other scale.

I've given up on ever expecting an open source phone. Apple likely spends more money developing just the keyboard than these OSS companies have to spend on the entire phone, software and hardware. There is just no way they can release something that's even usable, let alone competitive.

Did have an unexpected win in the form of the Steam Deck though. Never thought I'd have a powerful hand held, desktop linux gaming machine at an affordable price. Back in the day I was following the Dragonbox Pyra project and really liked the idea, but couldn't justify spending so much on a device that couldn't really do anything.

Yeah, but Steam Deck is a perfect example of corporate funded semi-open-source winning. It could literally never have happened without spending millions of dollars on FTEs, not to mention getting the hardware side right. That’s EXACTLY what I’m talking about! Nobody who doesn’t have a giant stack of cash is going to come disrupt le heckin’ market with a great UNIX phone.

The closest we got there in the phone market was Purism's Librem 5. That project funded tons of development, both upstream in various projects all over the stack and in original work like Phosh that later went on to live its own life - and of course all the vertical integration that went into PureOS. It significantly pushed the ecosystem forward and produced a working device that let me finally migrate away from N900 and that I'm still happily using as my daily driver. OTOH, it went way over the crowdfunded budget, caught enormous delays (including, but not limited to, COVID supply chain collapse) and almost killed the company...

Contrast that to the PinePhones, which were done cheaply in a "throw some hardware at the community and let them figure things out" fashion. This approach had both upsides and downsides, but ultimately I think it showed us that this community is still way too small to be able to sustain a project of such complexity on its own. There's still a lot to be done in this space and without Purism's investments things move much slower than they did a few years ago (though fortunately they still do move).

(disclosure: I'm one of the developers who were paid for that work)

I think in general the idea that open source means tons of crowdsourced free labor is both very misleading and very much oversold by people who do make money on it (I have also been paid to work on free software and done my fair share of shamelessly pimping free and libre software as a giant pool of free labor) (but I’m referring more to giant corporations that exploit community software)

It is a giant pool of free labor, but it's an uncontrollable pool which will go in whatever direction it wants to and doesn't care about what you would like it to do ;)

Why can’t Facebook spearhead such a project? Zuck has always complained about closed ecosystems not allowing them to release cool features. Google forbids android OEMs from developing devices for other mobile stack. So we really have two hurdles.

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