I can completely understand why you would say that but I think that could get complicated due to dependencies on upstream and due to interdependencies between components.
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I donated to that in the past. Between Fund Your App, a donation and a donation subscription, I suppose Purism is trying to create ways for people to pick how they want to contribute that suits them best. I like the subscription model in this case, because it’s only a relatively small amount and the support is continuous. I might be willing to donate $20/month, whereas $240/year all of sudden seems like something I might want to do, but will postpone indefinitely because it seems like a lot of money 
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I heartily agree with this agenda of work!
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“PureOS will continue to be freely available for all, there is no product difference for subscribers or non-subscribers.”
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Subscribed and supporting FREE software. Feels right and true.
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Awesome, Thank you. 
1 9 8 3
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I’m wondering what makes Purism’s case potentially part of the problem. Is it because they labeled it a “subscription” instead of “membership” or “recurring donation”? Is it because Purism is not a non-profit but a social purpose corporation (Announcement post [2017]: https://puri.sm/posts/purism-now-a-social-purpose-corporation/)?
The FSF, LibreOffice, Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, and many others ask for some sort of donation. System76 accepts donations for Pop!_OS (Click the “Support Pop” button).
If Purism does impose enshittification of their products, they aren’t locked down so we can use other software instead of PureOS and also hire people to work on alternatives (like what some other forum members have looked into, and this too).
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@WinstonSmith was referring to a quote from the blog post:
If for whatever reason you are still concerned about PureOS not being free in the future, you can utilize the Four Freedoms underpinning its software license for your own needs:
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Fortunately, there is no reason to fear.
This “subscription” program provides zero benefits to subscribers that are not available to non-subscribers. It is just a recurring donation initiative.
Purism has given every indication that they are committed to Free Software. If you have seen otherwise anywhere, please let me know, but I think you will find no examples of Purism saying anything but that they will only ever make Free Software.
I love this initiative, and I think it shows desire and commitment by Purism to restart their software development efforts. Rather than Purism giving up on software forever and focusing only on hardware sales, this initiative says to me that Purism wants to get started again on software development.
Purism is showing interest to do their part in furthering Free Software. If people have no spare money and are just trying to survive and pay their bills, they should take every advantage of Free Software without feeling guilt for not paying. It is available to them and they harm no one by using it freely. For the rest of us, the question now is, are we committed like Purism is to Free Software, or are we free-riders who just don’t care?
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the one concern with the purism post is that it is not explicitly stating what the roadmap is for which the funds are supposed to be used, i think more folks may subscribe if they knew exactly what the return on investment will be and a rough timeline to see the value in subscribing - as in what is in it for me
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This thread was featured in the following video from Brodie Robertson: [YouTube] [Piped Video]
My recs to leadership for adjustments:
- Merge toward a single WooCommerce page to include a “pay what you want” text box
- Summarize the tiers into a single product offering
- could allude to the Patreon, crowdfunding, etc, model: “pay $10+, get swag; pay $20+, get XYZ” and/or coupon voucher accrual over time
- Respond in some way to Brodie (could be as small as a video comment from the Purism YouTube channel, or a separate video entirely)
- I believe that Purism engaging more often and more directly with the community in social media is broadly beneficial for their public relations
I would have to clarify with leadership, but I suspect that the “subscription vs donation” semantic is due to taxation implications. I personally see this as a stepping stone toward getting back to a new-and-improved “Fund Your App” campaign, to perhaps be elegantly integrated once the implementation details are fully fleshed out.
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I think patches merged in Debian kernel first (since getting all patches upstreamed to mainline kernel can take a while) can help leverage the work done by debian kernel team (it will also free up time from both pureos and mobian developers to focus on other tasks) https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/merge_requests/666 Users will be able to use Debian directly as well and get support from its existing community.
This would mean, kernel updates come via trixie-backports without much effort from PureOS or Mobian.
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I’m proposing a different method of more targeted fund raising for mobian trixie (but those changes would be useful for PureOS Dawn as well) Debian on mobile feature prioritizing and fund raising proposed structure Those who want a more transparent process and result based fund raising may want to join hands.
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Can you explain how you would you do that? It’s my understanding that Debian’s kernel team doesn’t take any non mainlineable patches (for good reason) and the bulk of what can be mainlined in it’s current form has been mainlined years ago. See the corresponding Purism kernel blog posts by Martin and me on that topic. I suggested that course of action because I don’t think there’s a way around it: the remaining bits need to be cleaned up (which in some cases means redone) before going upstream. That’s why I put
Mainline remaining kernel bits so 1. becomes simpler
onto the list. And while that is ongoing, forwarding the kernel tree to newer versions is necessary (as otherwise mainlining bits is even less fun).
I think the important bit to lower the work for keeping up to date kernels working would be to resume that effort again. For some bits the cleanup is actually simpler than it would have been years ago as the kernel grew new infra and there’s certainly some smaller patches that can go upstream as is but those alone still wouldn’t give you a working phone. All the code is open and public so this isn’t necessarily blocking on Purism doing the work.
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The last comment on that MR from debian kernel team was
If it’s indeed possible to get all the patches upstreamed, then it shouldn’t be too hard to get it supported in Debian’s kernel.
But I’d really like it if the discussion and process can be postponed to the beginning of the Trixie development cycle as that gives me time to work on some other items on my TODO list which are of higher priority for me.As for this MR, if the goal is to get it into the Bookworm kernel, then it needs to target the
sidbranch. Themasterbranch would (effectively) target Trixie.
If the options in this MR are needed for Librem5, but would still not make it workable, then I’d suggest to keep it onmasterand thus target Trixie.
Draft: [arm64] enable devices found on the Librem 5 phone (!666) · Merge requests · Debian kernel team / linux · GitLab
So it looks to me Debian kernel team was open to including these patches, but were busy with bookworm release at that time. So they may be open to merging this now since bookworm release is already out. I’m not sure if I misread their intention. Now reading this again, may be they want it upstreamed first and only enabling it in Debian kernel.
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This is a defconfig change. The kernel team sure applies those (they’ve done it for the Librem 5 Devkit before (Enable Librem 5 Devkit (!404) · Merge requests · Debian kernel team / linux · GitLab) and while that is nice to have merged it won’t get you a working phone as there are non mainline patches needed to e.g. get the panel and other needed things up.
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This resonates with me.
I finally got around to considering whether to start a PureOS subscription. I’ve decided not to do it, because I don’t want to set up a recurring monthly payment in a foreign currency, due to the variability and uncertainty in the actual amount payable by me.
Changes in exchange rates, foreign currency conversion/transaction fees, and tax rules could all affect the amount I end up paying. Reviewing the likely cost of each payment in order to anticipate any rises in cost would become an administrative burden for me and it’s not clear that I could cancel the subscription in time to prevent any overly expensive payment from going through.
I realise that, in practice, a problematically large increase in the cost of the payment is somewhat unlikely. But I am risk averse and the fact that such an increase is theoretically possible is enough to put me off from this non-essential expenditure.
If I could pay for a whole year’s subscription in one up-front, assuredly non-recurring payment of 12× the monthly subscription amount, that would remove these concerns for me.
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I suggest you approach Purism, asking for that choice. It is not as if Purism should want to turn your money down. (As a one-off payment, it isn’t really a subscription but you would still be making a contribution.)
Whether Purism should offer subscription in e.g. € as an alternative to USD is another question. That would at least put the exchange rate risk on them, not you. They can hedge that risk if they want to whereas I would not expect individual subscribers to go to those lengths.
CW says that the USD is going down over the coming months though so, if anything, a fixed amount in USD likely won’t be any increase for you … but that’s just speculation and I understand that you want to avoid risk.
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I hear you. You can still donate once every 12 months (or whatever period of time you like). The costs should then be clear upfront.
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To add my two cents, I love the idea of the free software subscription, and I much prefer it over “fund your app”.
I think it fits better for a few reasons. Software development, especially high-quality development, is often (1) expensive and (2) boring.
Say, 1,000 of us subscribed to PureOS, at an average of $10/month. That would be a great success! And I suspect higher numbers than Purism actually has. Still, that amounts to $120,000/year. In the United States, especially after costs beyond salary are considered (payroll taxes, health insurance, etc), that might not be enough to hire even one excellent and experienced software developer to work on an operating system. Ideally, to push freedom-respecting mobile software forward, teams of top developers should be working on it. We need a lot more subscribers before we get too hasty in complaining about a lack of results.
Regarding the “boring” factor, although it would be nice for a person to be able to put $10/month in the jar toward their favorite app working on mobile and have it be meaningful, this is likely unrealistic. Purism does not really have expertise in XYZ app and its corresponding codebase, development team, etc, and as mentioned above regarding cost, it takes a lot of $10/month before it induces much high-quality software development. Like, if subscriptions are split amongst 20 different apps, and then Purism doesn’t have enough earmarked for any individual app to hire even one person specializing in the development of that technology, then that will be an ineffective system.
While it isn’t as flashy as “look at all these cool apps we are working on!”, focusing on more foundational aspects of the operating system, as Purism already has done, will lead to steady, boring progress, that will ultimately go much further and accomplish much more.
Also, Purism doesn’t have control over other projects, so there’s no guarantee they’d be able to contribute for the benefit of PureOS users anyway. Signal messenger is a perfect example. Many of the frustrations for Purism people related to Signal actually are not caused by a lack in Signal development resources (there is no such lack), but actually by anti-features intentionally created by Signal. For example, Signal tries to make either iOS or Android necessary for registering, rather than allowing a standalone GNU/Linux client. Purism could try to contribute to a standalone GNU/Linux client, but if the Signal project is not cooperating, or is even working against that effort, it could be a wasteful pursuit. So, what did this mean for “fund your app”? Signal was one of the top funded apps in Purism’s previous campaign, and what did Purism do to benefit any kind of native Signal running on PureOS? Basically nothing, and that is probably for the best, because Purism doesn’t really have the control they would need to make Signal work for lovers of freedom and free software.
No, the subscription to PureOS is better, and as long as Purism starts to produce results again (hopefully coming soon!), more and more people should subscribe to make mobile GNU/Linux super awesome 
P.S., one suggestion I have to improve the PureOS subscription model: Purism could make a commitment that all (or almost all? 90%?) of the money from subscriptions goes to PureOS development. I think that kind of financial transparency could be very motivating to people. Like, I would know for a fact that if I subscribe, then my money is going to boost Free Software in some way. I think people won’t be as likely to subscribe if they think Purism might just pocket the money or spend it to buy more hardware inventory or something.
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