Interesting three pieces in the article below. Martijn Braam known for his amazing work on the camera stack for Pinephone leaving due to issues with conflictive ‘Manjaro only and leaving support up to the community’ approach, Pine 64’s rebuttle, and Drew DeVault’s counter.
Perhaps the key takeaway here is directly financially supporting software development is unsurprisingly important. Building a piece of HW and tossing it to the community to build out the SW exclusively is not a move that will help drive Linux phone usability and adoption… so the Purism approach seems to be the correct one. Of course, if Pine64 were to better support developers there could be a case to be made there.
Of course worth noting that Purism itself is not perfect when it comes to communications, but the major contributions around Phosh and libhandy I think speak to the value of Purism’s approach of also owning driving the SW on their platform. Further, it is also worth noting that projects in the space like postmarketOS do take donations.