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

Hardware Librem 5
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81

If this guess is true, then I must conclude that Crimson will not be ready soon.
Research was (and is) not something I’m willing to support at the moment.

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82

So did any plan of action come out of this discussion?

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Good question. I think the answer is “no”.

As far as crowdfunding Crimson, I think it would be fair to ask: how much will that require? If the amount required is an order of magnitude beyond what posters in this topic in total are prepared to put in then this doesn’t fly.

I also don’t see this going very far unless Purism expresses buy-in for the idea - and the only thoughts so far from a Purism employee appear to indicate that their priority is elsewhere right now.

So just throwing a different idea out there … temporarily (and transparently) rework the “fund your app” page so that instead of funding any apps, all the money is directed towards the Public Offering. Each time the amount reaches US$500, 125(?) shares are allocated to the informal Fund Your App Trust.

Points to note:

  • It reduces the barrier to entry from US$500 to whatever you want to put in.
  • It avoids any complication of foreign share ownership (for those of us outside the US).
  • It is an investment in the future of the goals of Purism (even though you won’t personally directly benefit from it financially - but that isn’t much different from any special-purpose or general-purpose donation).
  • Whatever is left over at the end of the Public Offering (by definition an amount strictly less than US$500) would be rolled into the restored “Fund Your App” page.
  • I’m not a lawyer and I have no idea what complications US law might throw up.

Otherwise as noted above (post 54) you can just donate small amounts via the Purism Shop.

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@irvinewade
I like the idea but difficult to realise…

Generally:
The whole funding idea is a sympathetic thought, but rather complex. Besides defining the goal, monitoring it’s progress (milestones), defining the scope etc. There is also the question who will have access to the fundings, decides what and how much money goes to this or that, and how this person will be or must be checked for his/her doings.

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I compiled a quick list of questions that I think need to be answered before we can take some further action:

What precisely do we want to be done?
Who is the person (persons) who can do that?
What is an estimate on how long will it take?
What is the price (fixed price, hourly rate, whatever else)?
How we’re going to do project tracking?
Can we source enough money?
How are we going to source the money?
Where are we going to pool the money?
How we are going to pay the developers? Monthly/weekly/daily, all up front, part of it up front, rest of it when it is done?
What service are we going to use to pay the developers?
Are there any taxes and/or regulations that we need to consider?
What to do with the money if all of this falls apart?

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Check whos key is used to sign PureOS releases.

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I am only asking the question for the sake of the Purism community, not me. I already have alternative actionable crowdfunding plans outside of the forums.

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Oh, I’m not trying to be a smartass or something. I consider these to be legit items to consider before getting into it. I’m concerned that things can go south if we take this effort too lightly.

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That is why I wrote:

I tried to suggest where you can get funding for which layer.
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The separation makes sense. To get the equivalent of Byzantium with a newer base what is mostly needed is “distro” and QA work (what you have under 2.). See https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/OS-issues/-/issues/346 and related issues.

A switch to PW by default would involve some “lower level” work but that is (last time I checked) not a must for the update.

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@guido.gunther since you’re not working on PureOS at the moment I’m curious if you don’t mind me asking, are you still daily driving your L5? With Crimson, Byzantium, something else?

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@guido.gunther Also, as the most responsive Librem 5-related developer, would you have the time/interest in quoting what it might cost to get some of these Crimson tasks completed so we both A) understand how much it might cost to crowd source enough funding to make this happen and B) start spaming your Liberapay with donations to start getting some traction on completing Crimson tasks? :grin:

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In a way, I guess Purism is more and more resembling Pine64, being a hardware company relying on the community to solve the software challenges.

I am still daily driving the Librem 5, but I realize that it is turning into another kind of project than what I invested in 7 years ago. I do hope that this daunting venture will turn into something really useful in the years to come, but as it looks now the major workload will not be carried out by Purism.

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93

I don’t think that alone would allow Purism to build competitive/interesting product. There needs to be a substantial amount of development (both upstream work , integration tasks (which e.g. for pureboot or a phone are substantial at this point in time) as well as downstream bug fixing to make an end user friendly offer. Add to that the same look and feel over different device types, being able to seamlessly switch between devices (requiring privacy conserving backend services etc) and you’ll arrive at a substantial amount of design and development hours even when you build on existing solutions (which you should do if they exist) and contribute those back as free software.

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94

I don’t think there’s much left to do get a mostly usable variant out as “Beta”. The QA will likely (given the resources) take some time but the actual development tasks are rather trivial (especially compared to what was done in that regard already). (See Crimson Experience - #56 by FranklyFlawless and how most of the issues there are either easy to fix or also affect Byzantium like some of the current kernel instabilites).

(The kernel is a separate issue that needs consideration/work, I’d recommend to involve Martin early but it’s not crimson specific, those things affect Byzantium as well)

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Sure. It’s Debian Trixie based with Phosh Nightly (Phosh Nightly Package Builds · Phosh) with some packages from Mobian and PureOS.

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I see that there is actually a job opening for this work. Great!

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@guido.gunther , may I ask how you installed Debian Trixie and how you integrate in the Phosh Nightly?

I’m assuming for Debian Trixie, you just have an install image, and follow the the reflashing instructions but replace the images? Or is it more complicated than that?

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Back then when I set up the phone for development puroses: by

That is nothing a user should need to do, it’s PureOS primary role to have such things working out of the box. If you want to install anything trixie based right now the Mobian Librem 5 images are a good start (but I sure hope that Purism sorts out the PureOS update soonish).

Regarding adding phosh nightly see Phosh Nightly Package Builds · Phosh (but if you have Debian/Mobia trixie you already have pretty recent phosh, the nightly packages are there to use current git). Hope that helps.

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Thanks @guido.gunther !

I do agree with this. My L5 is a daily driver so I’ll think about whether to go down this path, or Mobian, etc. My frustration stems from apps are so old with the bullseye base. And I don’t have space on the eMMC to leverage latest builds from Flatpak.

I do hope Crimson comes along sooner. Even for my L15?!

Thanks again!

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Which I think everyone agrees with, unfortunately when progress slows and things arent working out of the box …

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