Starting up this topic again, in the What of the 180 day lead-time? topic, @amosbatto writes:
Because Phosh was designed as a thin overlay on top of the desktop GTK/GNOME ecosystem, it should be significantly cheaper to maintain and develop than the other mobile Linux interfaces, and unlike Plasma Mobile which has almost no corporate support, the GTK/GNOME ecosystem is supported by every single one of the large Linux companies (IBM/Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and Google), so Phosh can take advantage of the dev work being done by those companies.
Building upon well-funded efforts is the way to go. However…
Maybe I am wrong about the financial situation of Purism, but what I am sure about is the fact that none of the big Linux companies care about mobile Linux and are willing to pay for its development. If we decide that we don’t need a company like Purism to pay for software development, then we are choosing to rely solely on volunteer labor to develop mobile Linux, which is going to be slow and unlikely to create a mobile OS that appeals to ordinary users who don’t have technical skills.
So, the big companies we rely on don’t care about the mobile market, and many of them are software and service vendors, anyway. It’s clear that relying on volunteers isn’t going to deliver the devices that some people want, otherwise we would have them already. Relying on one small vendor isn’t going to do it, either, because it’s too much to expect and everything depends on their success.
The question is: how can mobile Linux be sustainably funded? Perhaps, lurking beneath that, there is also the question: is mobile Linux actually what people want?