They are likely to fail because they are under capitalized for what they are trying to do.<p>The manufacturing processes to produce a decent phone are fiendishly complex. The cost of equipment to do basic quality assurance of the hardware stretch into the millions of dollars.<p>If (and it's a HUGE if) they are able to ship, it's because they will have put all their trust into their manufacturer, and the manufacturer that built the product for them delivered.<p>> One of the big tasks of our software and design teams, working with our partners (GNOME, KDE, Matrix, Nextcloud, and Monero), will be to create a proper User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) for a phone screen.<p>No it's not. They should lay off all those people and spend all the money on QA / testing hw iterations. The strategy should be to try to spend the $2M as miserly as possible, until they have something that looks like a phone and passes a crapload of software QA tests. For what they have and because their prospects of raising vc cash are dim, burning 150K/month on ui & framework building is not a good strategy.
The i.MX6 CPU is, by the way, the CPU that is used in the opensource Novena laptop. Apparently it is a reasonably powerful processor, but more importantly, it doesn't require an NDA to access the datasheet.<p>I am not sure how things will be for the i.MX8, but I certainly hope that they will continue this practice.
I'm excited to see how this goes. I've been lamenting to friends of late how I don't feel there is anyone out there innovating on hardware/software to compete with the likes of Apple/MS/Google, but I see a ray of hope in puri.sm.
I wish them success. I didn't back it personally though, since hardware projects are very risky. Even Jolla tablet failed, and as a backer I'm still waiting for my money back. Mobile handsets are a whole level harder to make than tablets. But I'll surely buy Librem 5 once it will come out.<p>On a side note, when will they add etnaviv to Mesa's features.txt? So far it can't be shown in Mesa matrix: <a href="https://mesamatrix.net" rel="nofollow">https://mesamatrix.net</a>
I bought my purism laptop back in mid October and it still hasn’t been shipped yet. I can’t imagine the timeline for something that doesn’t have a processor picked out yet.
Has Purism allocated the resources necessary to both reverse-engineer the Vivante GC7000Lite and provide a <i>fully</i> working set of free software drivers for it?
Seems to me there would be lots of organizations out there, like corporations, that are deathly afraid of spying and hacking, and would love to be able to buy something like this.
I sincerely hope this project continues to forge ahead! But, I'm wondering if any thought is being given to the development of 5G devices by Purism, or is that milestone for the market still a ways off?
<i>From our contact from the Etnaviv developers we know that they are heavily working on the i.MX8M support so we can expect that Etnaviv will be working on it within the year.</i><p>What exactly are people funding Librem for if not to actually work on the most crucial component, the GPU driver?<p>I guess it doesn't really matter because if they want to have any hope of delivering they will be knee deep into Mesa and DRM before they know it. This isn't a blob you just copy into /vendor.<p>But their lax attitude kind of spells doom for the chances of this crowdfunding project.<p>Edit: whoops, they don't even want to use Android! But judging from their mockup renders they expect to have something just as good.
> collaboration with GNOME and KDE<p>Free software, or "why do anything once when you can do it twice for twice the cost and half as good?"