[leidenfrost]

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

[fragmede]

> 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.

[palmfacehn]

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.

[whytevuhuni]

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

[binary132]

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…

[WD-42]

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.

[Dalewyn]

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

[binary132]

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.