This is a pretty meaningless statement, in my opinion. That is, if this statement is supposed to mean that for the same reasons as Windows phones died, Librem 5 will also fail. Given that the audiences are different, the companies are different in in many you can think to measure companies, the devs have completely different aspirations and ideas and... heck, can you think of anything that is not different in these two scenarios??? how would you ever prove this is the case. Even if it fails, you would not be able to claim with a straight face that you know for sure that it failed "because of the same reasons as Windows phones".pawRoot wrote:
It will die same as Windows phones.
If with "drivers" you mean "kernel modules", then I believe they say in that interview that all the kernel code is mainlined. Mainlined means that it will be in the "base" kernel that you can download from kernel.org. This means that they don't need to provide anything at all. When they said that they will aim to make their own code freely available, I believe they were referring to user space programs (apps) that will be on the OS.makh wrote: ...If they do provide something as FOSS drivers and the major distros "mobile installation images", only then it may have more chance of survival ...
An interesting differnece with this and Ubuntu touch is that Ubuntu was sold on devices originally designed for Android. Because of this, when users got bored, they flashed Android back on them. Librem 5, however, has hardware that has never previously been used in a phone. This makes it sound like you most likely will not be able to replace the OS with Android if you want later. Maybe you might be able to tweak a custom AOSP image somehow, but you would have to develop the entire thing.
The baseband processor and GPS will contain closed proprietary firmware (and the law mandates that). But they are going to be hardware kill-switched. If it kill the entire modem/baseband, then perhaps it kills the SIM also.
Somebody points out that the SIM card itself has a microcontroller with RAM and all. It should be noted that sd-cards also have often several processors and their own RAM.
This e-sim stuff sounds pretty bad to me. That you would have a SIM that you cannot remove, essentially...
Also, did anyone else notice that Samsung made an announcement that they are going out with a Linux smart phone almost exactly after the Librem 5 project managed to get the funding? Apparently it will run their OS but you will be able to run Desktop Linux distributions in some emulation or some such.