Let's crowdfund some development to get PureOS Crimson ready for L5!

Hardware Librem 5
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I read this thread. My takeaway is that there seems to be no real agreement on how to get this done. There might be a few people who will contribute far-too-small amounts of money if it is done a certain way. There is no leader and no consensus on how to get this done.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but that’s how I see it. IMO, Crimson for the L5 is slow on coming out because Purism let go of (stopped paying) many of the contract developers (dos, dcz, guido.gunther, … We can’t really tell because Purism no longer lists “Core Team”). Perhaps it’s time to see what the difference is between Mobian and PureOS on the L5.

In the end, one has to ask: What will cause Purism to go back to funding ongoing L5 maintenance? Is that drop in maintenance resources due to them being temporarily cash poor? I don’t know – their recent 2023 financials show profit from a combination of an increase in sales (with a 53% margin) and a decrease in R&D+Expenses (e.g. paid developers, …). Purism still seems to owe people refunds and their stock sale does not appear to me to be going all that well:

Feb 20     226.5K    ?95? investors
Feb 29     240.5K    104 investors
Mar 5      254.9K    107 investors
Mar 7      282.5K    128 investors
Mar 13     291.4K    137 investors
Mar 17     291.9K    139 investors
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116

There is a leader, but no actionable plan due to reliance on Purism to perform the work on their behalf, which are instead promoting the StartEngine campaign as a method to indirectly fund Crimson.

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I’m pretty new here, so please excuse me if this is already explained elsewhere:

Why do we expect StartEngine campaign funds to be used (directly or indirectly) for the continued development of Crimson and ongoing software maintenance for Librem 5?

I just read through this entire thread, and it is somewhat alarming to me to find out that Purism has stopped paying anyone who is working on PureOS. (Everybody needs to be able to eat, pay rent, etc., and underemployment leads to financial insecurity, which surely makes it impossible for even the most skilled developer to maintain maximum productivity.)

In all of the public filings I’ve seen, Purism does not separate out software development or software maintenance from hardware development costs. Everything seems to just be marked as “R&D”.

It has become evident through the StartEngine campaign and from the postings of Purism employees that the intention of Purism is to pursue directing funds and energy toward creating and selling additional hardware, which implies that software maintenance and development will continue to languish.

I’ve heard suggestions that new hardware will drive the development of software improvements for Librem 5, but why do we believe that? Especially given the following:

  1. All of Purism’s hardware is x86 except Librem 5.
  2. None of Purism’s hardware comes with a cellular modem except Librem 5.
  3. All of Purism’s hardware comes with at least 8GB RAM and 250GB of storage except Librem 5.

Based on these facts (and more) the unfortunate reality is that the Librem 5 will always be harder to develop for than any other Purism product. And without guaranteed software investment focused on the Librem 5, it will never achieve parity with any other Purism product.

Put another way, new hardware == new software !== improvements for Librem 5.

Let’s look at this another way. According to Todd Weaver in the Start Engine campaign comments, “We are not raising anything outside of this Reg CF on StartEngine,” and he also confirms that only 25% of funds will be used for R&D.

At this time, the StartEngine campaign has raised about $324k. 25% of that would be $81k.

So how does that $81k R&D budget get split? Is it 50% Hardware, 50% Software?

If you have about $40k to invest in software, how much of that goes to new device support vs existing device maintenance?

To be brutally honest, $81k for an entire R&D budget is not enough. You cannot even pay one engineer for one year with that money, let alone buy any samples or assemble any prototypes. (I have worked on an R&D team for a small embedded Linux hardware shop before, so I have some idea what I’m talking about here.)

I know this sounds negative, but I don’t want to create a negative vibe here. I really want Purism to succeed, as long as we can all acknowledge:

  1. The StartEngine campaign is not raising enough money to support the meager plan Purism has outlined.
  2. The StartEngine campaign cannot realistically be used to crowdfund any further software improvements for Librem 5.

How can this situation be improved???

  1. I think Purism should explain how they plan to fund ongoing software maintenance.
  2. I think Purism should provide a dedicated mechanism for L5 users to fund L5 software maintenance.

If these issues do not get addressed head on, I’m worried the L5 software update story will end up being worse than the cheapest budget Android phone.

And when it comes time to crowdfund the L6, we need the L5 story to be a success story–not a liability.

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118

You can wait around until the leader decides to own up to their words at the very beginning of the thread instead of them choosing to defer all responsibility to Purism.

If you do not like relying on that possibility, consider hijacking this thread and assuming the leader’s role in their place.

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Only Purism can assign funds to a given use and only Purism can merge and sign changes into Crimson. Seems they have the majority of the responsibility by design.

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“Let’s crowdfund some development to get PureOS Crimson ready for L5!” suggests community crowdfunding outside of Purism, and forking is always an option with FOSS.

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I’m not recommending anyone else do this with their funds, but I have personally already begun to financially support postmarketOS. I don’t have a lot of excess funds to contribute, but I’m very encouraged by the continuous progress and efforts of that project.

Unfortunately, despite dabbling with a few other operating systems on various phone hardware, I have not found a suitable replacement for PureOS Byzantium on Librem 5 because I need reliable cell phone calls and my carrier requires VoLTE.

I agree community funding is most likely going to go to community projects, but my preference would be to see the manufacturer of the hardware leading the continued development of tightly-integrated software.

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In that case, your options are clear:

  1. Buy Purism hardware.
  2. StartEngine campaign.
  3. Donate to Purism.
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I agree, you’re correct according to the current state of affairs. And I (like many people in this thread) have already performed #1.

If I were to sum up my position, I’m simply articulating a desire for some modified version of #2 or #3. If Purism provided some clarity on how they plan to deliver software maintenance for L5, that would make me much more interested in proceeding with #2 or #3.

Hopefully that makes sense.

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Sure, perhaps Purism will acknowledge and answer previous calls to action as well.

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To me VoLTE already working OK on Librem5. However some carrier require a full compatible module v.o.l.t.e to work so in this case Purism It does not have the power to solve it easily for Librem5, then this means that the librem 5 telephone module is limited to work 100% in some areas naturally. There is a option in the module to see volte profile area support.

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Trying to summarize how things stand now, the way I see it:

  • Purism, for unknown reasons, is silent about the matter. Still no Crimson development happening (at least nothing seen at https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/OS-issues/-/issues/346). It would be great if Purism said something, @francois-techene mentioned the possibility of Purism creating a “fund PureOS” campaign, that would have been great. I’m still hoping for an answer on that, but in the meantime we can also consider what could be done without Purism being directly involved.

  • The original idea in this thread was to handle funding independently from Purism, using something like Liberapay. I would like this to happen, but it requires at least one of the developers to step up and say “I’m willing to do some work on the Crimson issues, here is the Liberapay project you can donate to, provided amount X is donated I will start working.” I really wish one of them would say that, but so far that has not happened. I have reached out to several of the developers, a couple of them first replied that they might be interested but then they have not responded anymore. I don’t know why. I will keep trying to reach them.

One of the developers hinted to me that it would be weird to handle funding “behind Purism’s back” so to speak, that it would be better if Purism would handle the funding. I agree that would be better, but the problem is that Purism is not doing that. So then we are stuck. It is a frustrating situation where everybody agrees the work needs to be done, it’s not a huge amount of work (according to Guido), and money to fund it is there (still sitting in my bank account) but there is no way to direct that money to the developers who could do the work.

So, we need some kind of action either from Purism or from at least one of the developers.

In an attempt to convince them to act, here are some thoughts on why the current situation is bad:

  • Librem 5 users like me, who enjoy being part of development and trying to help progress along by bug reports, actively testing and troubleshooting and perhaps even submitting patches, are no longer able to do that now because the software is so old. Debugging something on my L5 today is less meaningful because upstream developers will just tell me to first run a newer versions of whatever packages are involved. So this is a resource that is currently wasted, people who would normally voluntarily help development (at zero cost) are now unable to do that.

  • Knowing that development has stalled makes it less likely people will recommend Purism’s products to others. I can say this for me personally, but I imagine it is true for some others as well. This hurts Purism’s chances of making new sales. Purism is losing the support of your core supporters, who would normally be helping spread the word to others.

  • Anyone reviewing a Librem 5 today will get a bad impression because the software is old. If a tech journalist looks at it and sees that Purism has their own GNU/Linux distro will come to the conclusion that it is in practice no longer maintained, which looks really bad. Again, this hurts Purism’s chances of making new sales.

So, there is a lot to gain by getting Crimson ready.

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Right, and if it does not work, there are other options available.

Primarily because Purism should be responsible and not the community, but it is evidently clear that calls to action scattered throughout this thread have not been answered. Either we continue to wait around or decide to do something about it.

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Agree, Purism has NO answer for us. I fear that the project L5 is now on something like hold and slooooooow development. Maybe money is not the only issue here?

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As all the relevant source code bits are in Purism’s gitlab and the projects are open for everyone to contribute:

  1. Find an independent contractor to work on PureOS for the L5

(I think that was basically the option this thread started with)

This would leverage the power of Free Software / Open Source. It has the minimal risk that Purism ignores the contributions and they bitrot but I’d say that’s rather unlikely if they’re of good quality.

I’m aware that the other alternative would be to ask Purism to switch to Mobian, pmOS or something else but in contrast to the above I’d assume that’s rather unlikely as it would make it harder to support the same stack over all devices.

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@dcz suggested talking to @evangelos.tzaras about working on Crimson, but @Skalman already did that. I also suspect the remaining candidates have already been contacted with as well.

Outside of this list, I only know about former Purism staff who dealt with firmware.

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I think … maybe better if the L5 will be developed further by Mobian. They HAVE a running version of newest Debian with phosh/pmmobile

Why not bundle the efforts and not work parallel on 3 places for the same thing

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I just wanted to say thank you for all your efforts on this thread and for taking the lead in many respects. Much appreciated. I am only willing to have my wallet open in case somebody leads this and tells me about a “plan” I can get behind with my good vibes and wallet.

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Because there isn’t. Go and check out Debian On Mobile · GitLab and see how people from Mobian, PureOS and Debian cooperate on the same set of packages.

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Why then not take Mobian as a base for the L5 and let the people wait here on a hopeless old Debian base?
We all understand that the resources on Purism are smaaaallllllll. But since some time no commit on the future of the L5’s software and much more?

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