I spoke to Ash Nazir, Carsten Munk and Carsten Haitzler and a few more people last night about wanting to help Purism NOT make avoidable mistakes with the Librem 5.
I had contacted Zlatan Todorić, who is the technical lead for Purism OS, a few days back. I told Zlatan that I love Librem’s approach, but that I felt that Librem 5 would fail because their approach looked like a naive port of Desktop Linux.
I offered to organize a get-together here at FOSDEM to get all the:
- Psion
- Symbiant
- OpenMoko
- Maemo
- Neo900
- Moblin
- LiMo
- SLP
- Bada
- WebOS
- LuneOS
- MeeGo
- Tizen
- Mer
- NemoMobile
- SailfishOS
- AsteroidOS
- Jolla
- Zipper
- Ubuntu Touch
- KDE Plasma Mobile
- GNOME
- Qt
- FirefoxOS
- Replicant
- CyanogenMod
… people who we can muster while we are all in the same place here at FOSDEM.
To share our learnings from previous failed attempts at building sustainable mobile Linux platforms. I think that Purism have good hearts. They have done a great job on desktop with the Librem line, but mobile is another beast. It is weird. Really weird. But we have people with deep mobile Linux experience in the world and many of them are here today. We need the greybeards to help mentor and buttress Purism’s mobile efforts!
There is still an army of us who want an open hardware, open OS mobile platform, though we are currently fragmented. I saw a lot of N900s today. So let’s build bridges and collaborate and help each other.
I think that Purism have the best chance of succeeding here, and I think that we should help and support them. It they are to fail, let’s ensure it is at least in a new way!
Hope you guys are all around on Sunday afternoon and up for it?
Two birds of a feather sessions on Sunday:
- 2pm – Blockchain – H3227
- 3pm – Mobile Linux Devices – H.3228
There is a session on Monero earlier in the afternoon and this blockchain BoF immediately before the Mobile Linux Devices one if that is of interest too? A number of us are working in both mobile Linux and blockchain now.
Please come and help. We are stronger together!
Bob Summerwill, Brussels, Belgium, Sat 3rd Feb 2018.
Bob's Blog 
Bob,
This is Florian from UBports. It has been awhile since your post but it seems like Purism did not listen to any advices from experienced people so far, and indeed made the same mistakes as others before. We are still trying to get Ubuntu Touch ported for their devkits that we have received, but we will not be able to deliver on the proposed start of shipment. That´s because the followed a strange logic with how to treat existing communities and projects, and tried to better not work closely together when the time was there.
BR Florian
Hey Florian!
That is really too bad. Are you on Telegram? I am @bobsummerwill there. Would love to hear more.