[Gigachad]

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.

[binary132]

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.

[seba_dos1]

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)

[binary132]

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)

[seba_dos1]

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 ;)