[ddevault]

I'm very pleased with Pine64 and I think they're doing a tremendous job of pushing open hardware and doing it right, and I am a frequent buyer and occasional contributor to various pine-adjacent projects accordingly. But it really disappoints me that they aren't committed to free (as in freedom) platforms. I die a little bit every time I see them call you to join their Discord channel in these updates, or to follow them on Twitter, or post on their subreddit. Especially for a project in close collaboration with Linux distros, IRC and mailing lists are an important communication medium which is under-emphasized and under-utilized by Pine.

Pine seems to understand the value of free software within their phones, but why not without? It's very frustrating to know that a sizable fraction of their development discussions are being had on the other side of propriatary garden walls.

[type0]

I agree, communication is important but it also matters how we communicate. I had the same gripe with ubuntuists about Telegrams' servers, sure they are pragmatic about open source but when you have equally good FOSS tools and then decide for some stupid reason not to use it tells you something about how much people care. My local LUG btw preaches Free Software and uses Slack, so there's always circles like that.