Librem 5 concern

Hardware Librem 5
81

Well, in light of this, the conversation is pointless indeed.
The type of the company Purism is, and their articles of incorporation are the basis on which I put my trust in them. Those are important things. Those are the things that differentiate Purism from other big or not-so-big tech. Those are the things that protect Purism from malicious investors, that would like to buy into them and force them to change their business behavior. Downplaying those is a mistake.

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82

I don’t mind closed source, I have used a closed source program for manufacturing written in Fortan77 for 35 years. It’s ironclad, has few flaws (flaws becuase users shoot themselves in the foot with bad data.) But then again, it ain’t a phone. (Actually if you had a license of the program you got a copy of the source in case you want to modify it. You just couldn’t redistribute the source to third parties.) I guess what I’m saying is closed source has it’s place.

83

I don’t mind the 32GB limit, but then again, I’d also get a Jitterbug if it suited me. Don’t mind external storage either, online or off. I mean, I’m used to tape. I guess 25 years ago 32GB would be a the size of a typical data center. it all exploded when every executive and his mother kept multi-MB files of their family photos and videos and emailed them.

The idea the service will delete messages over 30 days old is a step in the right direction. It even promotes the right to be forgotten.

84

I’m not on a tight budget, I don’t mind the $650 just to see how it works, or even if it works at all.

That being said, I wouldn’t order one for my wife if the one I get doesn’t work. But if it does, I’m all for it.

(We’re both on old Android 4’s with a slider you see. next to last model made.)

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85

It may be possible that the world has changed in the last 35 years. :slight_smile:

Let’s say your application was truly closed source i.e. you had no choice but to trust the vendor. For a start, the application presumably wasn’t on the internet. So if it wanted to exfiltrate your data, it would have had to work a whole lot harder. In addition, successful exfiltration might be of company confidential information rather than personal information i.e. more likely for the purposes of industrial espionage than surveillance capitalism.

As far as I can see, for security “closed source” is questionable (but that requires a lot more information about the environment to make a full assessment) and for privacy “closed source” is untenable. That doesn’t mean that “closed source” has no place. No doubt in many corporate situations running software that to the rest of the world seems niche, there is no realistic choice.

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86

The world has changed, but business processes, and accounting practices, not much. But in the end it will be replaced by SAP in a couple years. And SAP if anything is also closed source, and is the most popular program around for business. At 80K employees, my company is well entrenched using it. (The conversion is only because of an acquisition of a 2K employee company using the older software, if not acquired, the old company would have happily continued using it until the O/S fails on 1 Jan 2028.

P.S. I only refer to my company in all inferences.

87

It’s not as simple as deleting all the apps. I choose to not be tracked anymore. The freedom of choice is important to support. If it’s not important to you then no one is forcing you to but a Librem. Don’t buy it. Cheers.

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88

Wow… in some ways this stuff is classic and I can relate – to your style, if not your substance. I often have to play passive aggressive to get my point into the ecosystem that I work in (cybersecurity contractor in a military environment).

The difference is that when I fail a fact check, it’s rare and an honest mistake. I’m getting a different vibe from you. Your incorrect “facts” already been pretty comprehensively listed by others; I don’t need to pile on, but I will address one that hasn’t. To wit, you pull the verbal bait-and-switch by substituting “social justice” for “social purpose”. They are very different things. I’ve seen nothing in Purism literature or posted by Purism employees or other forum users to indicate that anyone here is some sort of Social Justice Warrior. Nothing.

What really puzzles me is that you are clearly intelligent and articulate, so it occurs to me that you may be intentionally ignoring the facts to bait people on the forum. I suppose it could be very entertaining to a certain type of person. If that is your game, then both kudos and shame upon you, as you’ve been at least partially successful.

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89

Hmm, so let me get this straight. Matrix’s entire goal in life is to provide an Interface Protocol that allows you to send a chat to anyone on any other chat system and you say you’re ok with no other chat system using it. Which basically means, if no one uses it then what exactly is the point?

They also talk about having a phone protocol to allow end to end encryption on phone calls but that already exists through other services and they don’t actually have one themselves. Seems like nothing more than a lot of talk.

90

This is like a tire fire of a train wreck I just can’t look away from…

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91

see this is the typical response from left wing democrats that have been taught in school that life is merry if only we all got along and were nice to each other. If someone disagrees you either bail out or get ugly. I would love for Librem 5 to be awesome. All I’m saying is that instead of Purism trying to sell phones right now which they are obviously no where close to pulling off, that they should instead release more development phones that others can get hold of and spend time perfecting. Release the real phones this time next year.

They apparently only released the phones for developers 6 months ago and are expecting miracles from everything that is working for free. It just won’t work and obviously isn’t working given the fact that they are demoing nothing but crazy solitare and 1 + 2 calculator. Has anyone seem more from these phones that I’m missing?

I’m honestly wanting to see exactly that the phone can do since it is expected to be released in a month or 2. I would love to buy one right now if someone can show me what it will do. Forget the apps, just basically use it as a phone and take video and pictures. What will the battery life be?

And battery life is something no one has even addressed that I can see. Consider that the primary reason Apple and Google don’t run full blown systems on their phones is because of this very thing. A real operating system on a hand held device would only last a few hours since it is not optimized to save battery life. This is why iOS doesn’t allow apps to run wildly in the background because it would kill the battery in only a few minutes.

Instead of arguing with me show me some pudding. :slight_smile:
G

92

Welcome back! :wave: That was quick :slight_smile:

I see you’re trying hard. Keep trying :wink:
Video calls via Matrix is already a thing. And bridging to other protocols is also already a thing. And… basically the point of bridging is that it works… despite other chats not talking the Matrix protocol.
So why would I want the very companies that I try to get away from to adopt Matrix?
But it’s nice that, in some cases, I can talk to those on other platforms.

Comedy gold :joy:

Which is why, as we all know, Android (a real operating system in contrast to iOS), is literally dead after a few minutes of idling.

93

Ok, so I apologize on this aspect because earlier searches found people discussing the fact that the chip on the phone would NOT work with Verizon and only maybe work with Sprint and AT&T. I don’t have the link so will just drop this issue as I was clearly wrong.

94

  1. I am most definitely not doing this for entertainment. I started reading everyone bashing the original poster and couldn’t take it any longer as no one was answering his questions and were instead bashing him.

  2. The entire thread has gotten off topic as the original poster was commenting on the phone as it was listed and got for the most part attacked. Instead of just addressing his statements people started calling him a child and other things.

  3. Then for some reason we got onto the type of this company and how that totally prevented them from being able to sell out to another larger company and I remarked that it was crazy to even think that. The type of corporation they filed as is only supported in a few states, is not recognized by the federal government and nothing could be done if the owner decided to sell out. At least in all my years I’ve never seen or heard of a company that couldn’t be bought.

Again, this is quite pointless though as it has nothing to do with the phone. I was only even bringing it up to point out that you can’t assume life will continue as it is forever. This company may start out with grand plans and then fork and go out of business because all of its loyal customers left them. They could get this open platform kicking ass and then all of the companies that they hate write apps for it and bam, you’re right back where you started. Sure you’d have an open OS but you’d have closed programs running in it.

Also, trying to put a tag on all of Corporate America as being evil and bad just because Google for the most part is, is a pretty college’y thing to do. Only kids being brain washed by their college professors into believing stupid ideas would consider this. I own a company and I work hard to provide the best possible product to my customers. I have no evil thoughts and do not take advantage of them. I have closed software.

The fact is, Purism is a closed company as well. They make a profit and they don’t share every single email with us all to know exactly what their long term plans really are. Every company at the end of the day closes their doors for their meetings and future plans. If they didn’t everyone else would just take their ideas and do the same thing.

So, closed software is not a bad thing. Open software generally speaking is no where close to accomplishing what you can do in a closed software environment because no matter how much you guys want to believe society’s only problem is that we don’t hug enough, it takes money to do EVERYTHING. Each one of you have a job I hope and I doubt seriously that you take any of your money and give it away to everyone else so they all have a better life.

SO… Google: They suck, I hate them. However, they are the only company offering the most kickass CLOSED platform for maps. The thing makes apple maps look like a childs toy (also closed) and any open source program, well, there isn’t one. Why? because it takes a lot of time and money to produce something like that and even more to keep it going. So, Google says, we’ll do it and give it to you for free but you have to look at our ads to use it. And all of the world said awesome, we can be bothered for a second to take advantage of that.

That was all fine for a while before they started tracking and storing all our movements. Which none of us were really ok with. They did this to increase profits on their side in order to provide their customers (businesses) better focused ads. This is where I start to hate them as a whole. But what are my options now? Don’t have maps and go back to paper? Or use Apple maps which is a much less useful program but does get me where I need to go 95% of the time. At least they don’t track me.

But in all the years we’ve had google earth not a single open source (persons) have stepped up to take on a project that large and the one project that is running has nothing close to compete. I’m ok with this because I can’t expect people to work for free and usually am blown away that they do.

Look how long it took Linux as a whole to reach a point (in the last year or two) that it was actually stable to use as a desktop replacement. I use it now full time, not because Apple and Windows are closed, but because I think it is more useful. I hate Apple as much as Google but for totally different reasons. The point though is that I can leave them and I have options. This new phone would give us the same type options which we currently do not have.

I want this phone to succeed as I wished the Firefox phone would have. However, rushing into this market will only destroy any hope of pulling this off. Why are we rushing? Why do we not create more development phones so we can perfect the experience before we jump into the market? I can answer that and it comes in the form of money. Purism has invested a lot of money in this project and they also need to see a return. You guys have invested into it and want to see your return in the way of a phone.

So where you see greatness in this company I see products that are outdated and rushed. I would buy one of their computers as well, but seriously, they’re still selling 2 core i5 chips when everyone else is on 6 core i7’s.

G

95

Are we rushing? Being 6 months delayed?

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96

lol, the same reason I wish that Android users could use Apple messages. It is a far superior experience and I can’t chat with them over it. I shouldn’t care what platform you chose to use. I want the best user experience and if that turns out to be a closed system and I trust the company providing it I should use it. But if you want to chat with your mother and she’s on something totally different then well, you can’t.

I don’t really understand why you keep acting so smug making comments like:

Both Android and iOS are operating system, maybe you should look up what an OS is. And Android doesn’t die after a few minutes. Those phone do typically have larger batteries than an iPhone because they do handle back ground processes a bit differently but they do put them to sleep. On linux you can have a back ground process that is actually doing things back there and that isn’t good with limited resources.

G

97

when did this happen as their purchase page still shows this quarter 2019 shipping starts.

Any why can’t I purchase a development phone to play around with?

G

98

Hey, I’m just taking you literally. You said, “A real operating system on a hand held device would only last a few hours”. This implies Android and iOS aren’t real ones. Then you go on to state that iOS is basically superior (which i can agree to a certain extent).

Yes. But with free software apps, there are people who care to make sure background processes don’t do stupid stuff. And that’s not gray theory. People actually optimize that suff. For apps in other stores, you can hardly do anything about such stuff, which might be one reason for Apple to have these restrictions.

Both questions you wouldn’t have to ask if you even skimmed over the timeline I provided you with. You say you’re an adult, running a company. This implies you don’t need to be spoon fed. Do some research, don’t have others do it for you.

For clarification: I didn’t intend to say that it will be delayed a third time.

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99

lol, good point. I just don’t have time to dig through a time line to see things that should be printed in black and white on their purchase page. The time line got old to look at because all the videos you told me to go watch of them placing phone calls and sending text messages were so lame as to almost be laughable.

Also by real OS I meant a fully functional computer OS but I see your point as I wasn’t clear about that.

But for real:

Why can’t we buy development phones instead of waiting on real phones? We might be able to work on apps which will improve things in the long run. Look into why Windows phone died so quickly, it was because a multi-billion dollar company couldn’t afford to keep it afloat while waiting on developers to write apps.

And lastly, are there any actual better done videos that show what the phones are doing today? Showing a 10 second clip of the page showing a ringing icon and a sound playing isn’t exactly showing much.

G

100

We are posting daily videos of different apps running on the Librem 5 dev kit.

https://invidio.us/channel/UC64-PJ-yoF7aJ9pIHWEbrTQ

The Librem 5 on day one won’t have the same capabilities as Android 9 or iOS 12 but will definitely have more than iOS or Android at launch 10 years ago. Unlike iOS 1, you’ll be able to listen to music and not require the app to be constantly open :wink:

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