Canonical is gearing up for an IPO. As far as I can tell, Canonical is becoming no different than Red Hat (division of IBM) and SUSE (of EQT Partners) in terms of its focus on the cloud and enterprise customers.
Canonical lost money for years trying to promote desktop Linux, and both Red Hat and SUSE failed at the desktop as well. If Purism is going to be successful as company, it seems clear to me that it needs to follow Apple’s model of selling hardware and software together in a package that people value enough to pay a premium for it.
The challenge is doing that in a way that is ethical and doesn’t violate users’ rights like Apple does. In order to pay for the high development costs, Purism needs to avoid the commodification trap that has driven the profits out of the phone industry. For the next couple years, we don’t have to worry about the Librem 5 being commodified, but that might change once mobile Linux starts getting thousands of apps and Purism and PINE64 have proven that there is a market for Linux phones.
I think that Purism’s best defense is the fact that other companies which jump in the Linux phone market probably won’t be willing to design phones like the Librem 5. They will use chips that require proprietary firmware in U-Boot and the Linux kernel. They will solder down the cellular modem and Wi-Fi/BT.
I imagine that companies like Fairphone, SHIFT and Gemini will be the first to offer mobile Linux as an alternative. Then, bigger companies like Archos, BQ, Sony and OnePlus will see their success and start offering Linux as an option.
Imagine Purism trying to compete with OnePlus which is offering a future Linux phone with a Snapdragon 895 processor (3nm, 8x 3.0GHz Cortex-A79 cores & 8x 1.8GHz Cortex-A59), 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. Purism can’t win on performance, so it has to focus on a different group of consumers:
- People who want 100% free software
- People who care enough about privacy and security to pay for hardware kill switches and separate components and carry around a brick to get those features.
- People who use crypto-currencies
- Tinkerers and people who want to play with open hardware
- Radio tinkerers
- Environmentalists and people who care about planned obsolescence