I share your concerns but look at it differently. Private companies are constrained by market demands (which work better if you don’t have a screwed up market thanks to government interventions). Still even now, there is some limit to what the market (i.e. people) will tolerate as far as privacy invasion and other intrusive practices. It’s faster and easier for people to put a stop to bad practices, if they know and care about them.
Markets are “voting” for or against very specific things every day; with governments you only get one opportunity every few years, and even then you’re only voting for self-interested weasels who come with their own set of motivations which can’t be de-coupled from one another. If we vote with our wallets, it’s a much more “targeted” type of voting.
I don’t mean to say we can just trust the private world, I’m also furious with them. But there are more mitigations possible than there are with governments, so I worry about the latter a little more.
As far as how much we should trust that the people implementing government actually do what they say and promise they’ll do, the dangers of that trust have already been documented extensively.
Then you just call it something else lol By the time the lawyer got finished hashing it out the Gen 2 L5 14nm soc would probably be available or close to. Next gen m.2 modems would probably be hitting the market .
What is there to lose . Sell the L5 for a billion or whatever laugh at them for being so dumb and build a Libre 1 or something haha
As far as the upstreamed gnome Id make the license free for private individuals and charge for companies like pinephone for a limited time . Say 2 years or so to recoup dev costs and then have a sunset clause built in for any commercial entity who bought the license .
I mean Arch charges for their OS . Why can’t Pruism . Company wants to use it in their devices ? Lett’em pay till the sunset clause kicks in . Everyones happy . They get a plug and play FSF mobile OS which licensing fee expires in 2 years ? and Purism gets some dev duckets back .
As far as google . I doubt they’d even be so stupid to make that offer sans a non compete clause which bans Purism from making a FSF hardware switch phone Which I doubt theyd ever do . Or maybe they would who knows.
Google is junk anyways . CEO , Government attache’ , filthy frank that stares at you naked through your camera . Just junk .
Letting the market decide only works well if you have real choice in the market. There are millions of people who would prefer to have phones that don’t collect their personal data and don’t restrict them to a walled garden, but Android and iOS are the only real choices if they want to use a smartphone.
I agree with the sentiment that we should vote with our wallets if we want to see change, but I also see an important role for government regulation. In most cases, if you want to maintain a competitive market, the government has to step in prevent the formation of monopolies and oligopolies. Unfortunately, operating systems are natural monopolies in a free market, so we need government regulation to prevent Google and Apple from abusing their market power to prevent competitors.
In a couple years, when Linux becomes a viable alternative for mobile phones, we are going to need government regulators to prevent Google from only licensing Android to manufacturers who don’t produce Linux phones. I foresee a situation where Google might say to Sony, “if you want your next Android and Google Web Services license, you had better drop those plans to offer a Linux phone.”
I also believe that government regulations should prevent companies from selling phones where users are prohibited from unlocking the bootloader, so they can’t install another operating system and they can’t root or jailbreak the phone because that is set in the bootloader. If Linux truly becomes a competitor, Google might demand that its licensees stop allowing the unlocking of the bootloader, so every phone in the future will be a locked down like the iPhone or a Huawei phone.
Even though this approach might not be exactly in accordance with your initiative it is still worth to share with you that EU-wide tax for tech giants failed last year … but “the Czech government approved a 7% digital tax proposal” on this Monday … besides France and Italy to levy 3% tax. Might look like some kind of “foolishness”, but it isn’t.
Let Sony and Google or who ever, do any kind of deals they want to do. We don’t need to have the government regulate them. When the Librem 5 starts prolipherating in the market, the market demand for Linux-based, completely unlocked and open phones will spread. Purism will be fully funded at that point through a nearly unlimited demand that would be difficult for even Samsung or LG to keep up with. Eventually, everyone who wants one will have a linux based phone. Those other companies with special deals between eachother that hurt the consumers will lose-out on that business for as long as the public has reason to not trust them. Chinese phones will have a reputation for quite some time as spying tools against you. Eventually the hardware and software become incidental. People will pay for Purism’s social purpose. They won’t trust those who spied on them and targeted them with advertising when there was no other alternative.
But we can say most privacy feature with “modern” hardware. So they can do it 