Mobian started as a hobby project, triggered by the excitement of finally being able to hack one’s mobile phone at will. It is fair to say that the device that made it possible back then was the original PinePhone. However, after running once again into the same difficulties we experienced over and over, we’re wondering whether maintaining support for this device is still worth the effort…
https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/
To give you a sense of what we talk about: all patches in these folders are those we carry in Mobian.
https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/kernels/sunxi64-linux/-/tree/mobian-6.1/debian/patches
@mobian Same old story... Distros war, DE war... and now also the kernel which should be the COMMON cornerstone for everybody. 😤 With those project at the beginning there's always a lot of enthusiasm, confusion, then different ideas and approach lead to the disaster. Take the lesson from previous examples like Openmoko. Imho without a more "professional" approach I'm worry soon or late things will fall into oblivion. I bought my #Pinephone knowing that, but I hoped in a different destiny...
@KinmenRisingProject @mobian If you want "professional", someone needs to pay for it. Otherwise you're fully at mercy of your community becoming big and diverse enough for someone with the right skillset to step in and do the needed stuff before the interest fades. And even when they do, they do it on their own terms - you can't demand anything.
Ever wondered where the price difference between PinePhone and Librem 5 comes from? Hint: there's no trouble with maintaining the Librem 5 kernel tree.
@dos @mobian We already know that. But professional >< enterprise. It isn't just a matter of cost, but also of will to give up your own private garden and join a field where you play following common rules. Even developing for yourself has a cost: your time, your money, stress, etc. Let's say it all: many open source fail because they are a total chaos. The approach/model of the most used LInux/BSD/etc keeps their ethic (not perfect,ok) and they do work well. Because there's organization. (...)
@dos @mobian Is that difficult to get 2-3 pine distros working together to achieve the same scope for such "small" project like a phone? Freedom doesn't mean total chaos. Focus on what everybody wants (a working phone). A final consideration: what would the Linux kernel be nowadays without a governance? Tnx for your contribution to the discussion, btw 🙂
@KinmenRisingProject @dos @mobian the thing is, this kind of work is incredibly time consuming. It's just hard. And there's actually way less incentive to do it for a device like the pinephone.
Pine64 won't pay you, but will directly profit from your work. Due to the immense popularity of the device you will receive a huge number of messages from people asking when feature X will be ready or trying to use you for tech support.
last but not least, i'm not sure how much attention upstream sunxi support actually gets, whos maintaining and testing?
compare that to working on a Qualcomm platform where your work is likely to benefit many different devices which are already out in the wild (rather than having to buy more future e-waste). There is a growing upstream community, and you can actually get paid.
the pinephone issue isn't for lack of trying, there just isn't anyone who wants to work on it because you just don't get anything in return except for users complaining about things and a company using your work to sell more products.
@cas @dos @mobian It's not an exclusive of Pine64: how many manufacturers do pay everybody working on on their hw for making floss/foss fw,drivers, sw? When somebody creates a device, somebody need to invest money. PIne64 like everybody else payed (and pays) for project, components dev. etc. & a company to exists must earn money. What you get in exchange is a device where you can install LInux.
I agree about time consuming activities (I ✍️ the same in a previous post of this thread) but (...)
@cas @dos @mobian if you do this to get 💰, well than we are talking about jobs, smth different. About different platforms I'm not competent to say what is worth to do and what is not. I just point out that pine📱is a dev. device with all its problems. If you buy it, you know that. Not much different from a testing version of Pi/Arduino etc. I know that being a foss dev for free is often frustrating, but it's always better than digging coal in mines.For what it counts,I'm 😃 to contribute 4 free
@KinmenRisingProject @cas @mobian Both Pi and Arduino employ developers that act as stewards for software support for their platforms. Even Openmoko did.
I did my fair share of unpaid development work in the mobile GNU/Linux world across the last two decades; I also had an opportunity to get paid for such work, so I know both sides well:) I wouldn't be able to do half the things I did if had to earn for living with something else as well, and the community is still small enough for it to matter.
@KinmenRisingProject @cas @mobian Once we get to the size and level of organizational maturity of Debian, Linux or similar hugely successful FLOSS projects, then things will mostly work on their own: if there's something that needs to be done in Linux, eventually someone pops up and does it, paid or not (though more likely to be paid, in fact!). We're nowhere close to that yet, I still regularly stumble upon issues that turn out to be trivial to fix but that simply nobody looked close at so far.
@dos @KinmenRisingProject @cas @mobian Fully agree on that! Partly due to the small size of this community, we lack the people with the right combination of personal (or corporate) interest, skills and available time. Which is pretty much why this particular kernel ended up being maintained by a single person, drastically reducing the bus factor.
Also, a phone is nowhere near a "small" project, that's actually one of the most complex piece of hardware...