Wait until @francois-techene provides an update about Crimson after the StartEngine campaign ends on April 30th, assuming no further SEC filings occur.
If no update is provided within one week of the campaign end, suggest open-source bounties for the checklist items in the Road to Crimson meta-issue on GitLab.
My offer to match the one-time donation to any organization is protected until news of a Crimson update is published, and/or there is a new product release such as the Librem 16. In either case, I will assume Crimson has funding by Purism, and with the latter, I will very likely be upgrading from my Librem 14, subject to a thorough product security audit.
You realize that from the standpoint of people who have unfilled refund requests or phones that never worked or are having issues dealing with support, or perhaps other people holding back due to concerns with this sort of thing, that this is simply asking people to throw good money after bad?
My post was intended for the forum in general, and I assumed anyone waiting for a refund would think to themselves that “this obviously doesn’t apply to me”. I have edited the post to avoid further misunderstanding.
I also assume you understand that the context of my suggestion is Purism’s cash-strapped situation. Please add your own ideas on how to improve their ability to fulfill refunds.
Assuming that one reason why Purism did not say anything about donations towards Crimson for L5 is that the StartEngine campaign was ongoing and Purism wanted all money to go into that. Now that the StartEngine campaign is over, maybe something could happen now?
To summarize the situation again: software development to get Crimson ready for L5 is desperately needed, but Purism has halted development. There has been zero development over the last several months, at least no progress seen at the https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/OS-issues/-/issues/346 gitlab issue. At the same time there are people (myself included) who want to donate money specifically towards getting that done. My discussions with some of the developers lead me to believe that Purism handling the money is much better than trying something independently “behind Purism’s back”. It would be great if Purism would say “yes, we will take your money and use that to fund development of Crimson for L5, here is how to donate, here is how we will report progress”.
Hoping for an answer from @JCS or @francois-techene who mentioned earlier the possibility of a “fund PureOS” donation campaign.
As briefly mentioned in the Sitemap thread, there is a WooCommerce listing for donating to PureOS development and support, but it does not seem to be functioning at the moment:
At this current point in time, I do not think the backup plan will need to be utilized, considering the WooCommerce listing above has direct correlation with what @JCS was stating earlier:
That being said, I already did quite a bit of research into crowdfunding open-source development, although they tend to be focused on bug bounties. If progress from Purism noticeably ceases, then I will reconsider and suggest the backup plan based on its demand.
I think that any pooling of money for software development should be done outside of Purism. Allowing Purism to manage the money hasn’t always worked out well. If an outside party manages the money, then the money can be distributed to the most worthy projects. For example, if things happen inside of Purism that too many people disagree with, then the money could start flowing in to projects that Purism does not benefit from. Maybe something specific to the Pine Phone could be funded. But then when Purism gets on-board with what the community really wants, the money could then be directed in to projects that directly benefit Purism.
Hey foks,
Not to hijack onto this post but—you can already support many FLOSS projects that are on the Librem 5! You can always show your support for them.
I usually make small donations to many of the projects I utilize as a show of support.
You came too late to have enough “experience” with Purism. People that follow Purisms activities since pre-Corona-time have a lot more and know better how things are going on. And what’s the point in donating to Mobian or PostmarketOS when they don’t work much on things like firmware or drivers? I mean, you can donate them - nothing wrong about it - but I don’t think you will be happy with the current state, too.
Late to the party, and haven’t read all the comments, so this might be redundant:
Having just tried for an hour to send a picture to my girlfriend and having to force reboot the phone 3 times, and still not succeeding, I have to say:
I don’t care that much about new features or a new version of PureOS, I want stability and a set of reliably working basic features. When that’s in place, then we can talk about new features and more niche security features. I just want to be able to reliably make a phone call…
My experiences differ not much from Yours…things on the L5 work not really reliable. Modem crashes are happening frequently and the phone sucks the battery faster empty as I can look for this
Today made 2 phone calls and nothing more and energy is on 29% after 10 hours up.
You do not use suspend then. This was the time I had at beginning, too (13-14h without suspend). When Purism started developing it was around 6 hours in best case. I think with 18h (and 2 phone calls) it’s quiet usable, even if far from being optimal.
At the moment I don’t fear anything about Librem 5s future since we always can move on to Mobian (and that was the real promise made by Purism: no need to have them on board to have an up to date OS). PureOS and updating to Crimson is just the easier way and until there is no clear signal that they totally stopped development, it’s worse it to look forwards to Crimson. But that’s just my opinion.
