I have a few ideas for dealing with this “independent contractor” issue:
Create a job contract post on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.) referring to the Road to Crimson GitLab meta-issue.
As a community, decide on which specific aspect of the GitLab issue should be focused on first, then negotiate an open-source bounty for it to attract interest.
Repeat step 2 whenever an issue is resolved until the Road to Crimson meta-issue is closed.
This breaks down Crimson into manageable, low-risk financial chunks, with frequent updates.
Personally, I would consider funding if MMS support with multiple Access Point Names was part of the plan. I have been unable to send MMS for more than 3 years (except once but I were unable to renew the experience), it’s really difficult not to make other end users laugh about me in 2024. Receiving MMS isn’t straightforward yet as I have to manually select the MMS APN. As far as I know, I’m not the only person to complain.
Purism seems to have ZERO interest in what we are discussing here. Sometimes NO words are also a statement.
Nobody official gave something like a perspective or a plan since months. Support does not answer or have any idea for issues and problems with hardware
Therefore I think it would be better to find a Mobian dev and give him/her the money with a concrete project and aim.
There are currently 27 days left in this campaign.
I believe Francois has stated in a one or two places that we should expect to news/movement after it’s over.
I think this is a little disingenuous to say. It was suggested by Purism staff that they will not be engaging in Crimson-related tasks until sometime after the StartEngine campaign is complete.
From Francois (earlier in the thread):
We are currently putting our energy on hardware and will soon release new products because that is what we sell. In parallel, we are running the public offering campaign, which is doing pretty good so far. All this will help resuming software development to its full speed. That’s the plan. Crimson, Phosh, Calls, Chats, Librem One will be part of our top priorities.
I’m all for being critical of Purism for legitimate faults but this seems like a little much…
Purism states in their “Offering Memorandum” document (page 7, under the “Risk Factors” section) from their campaign page (https://www.startengine.com/offering/purism) that “Even if the maximum amount is raised, the Company is likely to need additional funds in the future in order to grow […]”. I have my doubts that the maximum is enough to sustain them but I do think it would be enough to get some traction to restart development and obtain those additional funds in the future.
Given the conversations I’ve seen across this forum, I have my doubts that Purism this campaign will reach the maximum amount they are offering. I do want Purism to succeed and do good things for users. I am unfortunately in a position where I cannot contribute to their campaign anymore, despite me saying so otherwise in other places.
Purism is guaranteed to fail if the community does not believe in them and I think we’re at that stage unfortunately. Purism needs money to be able to fund development but the community wants to see development from Purism so it seems unlikely they will pull through unless there are more people willing to bet on them.
I plan on preordering/acquiring the Librem 16 once Purism announces and releases it with hardware kill switches. I also read hints about Purism preparing quantum-resistant cryptography, so I have other reasons to stick around.
I no longer have any interest in investing, especially considering my previous experience (or lack of it) with StartEngine.
Related:
I have already donated to Purism, and provided ideas to dealing with the “independent contractor” issue mentioned by @guido.gunther. However, I am not interested in going out of my way to participate in the Fediverse for the first time to create a job contract post.
By the way a point I didn’t read yet. I really want to donate a bit (even if I cannot as much as others can). But I would like to do in Euro, not in Dollar. Currency exchange is always a pain and we loose more money on many little exchanges than one big, where all money is collected together.
My recent commission with @dcz was arranged with a conversion between USD and EUR, so if you are okay donating to them instead, I will donate an equivalent amount in USD to any organization on your behalf, based on xe.com mid-market rates.
Forgot to answer. That would be an option I like. I will write a PM to you when it comes to an action. The community has still no plan how to act and first I want to see such. A solo action wouldn’t make much sense.
I am strictly here for the Librem 5. It is an on-again off-again daily driver. I would imagine there are many who are the same.
There should be a crowdfunding mechanism devoted strictly to Librem 5 PureOS development/integration.
(Whether through Purism or backchannel to associated developers, until/if they won’t organize-- Purism shouldn’t care, their product stands to benefit)
Quite bluntly, I will never be interested in non-Librem 5 products.
I think then you have not understood how these things work. The thing is that PureOS is based on Debian, and a huge amount of things are getting updated when new Debian versions are released. PureOS Byzantium is based on the old Debian 11, which everyone else are leaving behind now. Therefore, working on updating Byzantium is really hard at this point, because upstream developers have moved on. To make things work in a good way it is necessary to move to Crimson because that is based on the now current Debian version, Debian 12.
That is why I think the move to Crimson is so important, it is the basis for being able to continue with making the software for the L5 better.
There are many bugs right now that I would like to get fixed, but trying to fix them for Byzantium is not going to work because Byzantium uses too old versions of many things. We need Crimson first.
Not just that. Phoc, Phosh and other parts of Librem 5 are already 5 versions and more ahead. There are bugfixes we don’t get on Byzantium, but on Crimson. And taking the time to backport them is wasted time that will not be available for drivers etc.
