> It's highly likely that you have a financial stake in the company's products because nothing else would explain your devotion to so thoroughly misleading people and marketing their products across many platforms.
Let me state for the record that I have no financial stake in Purism, and I do not represent the company. I am simply a customer of the company who tries to correct the misinformation that I see being posted about the Librem 5 on public forums like this one, because I think that Purism is doing important development work for mobile Linux. I am using my real name "Amos Batto", and anyone who does a simple internet search can find my personal blog, my github page, my facebook page, etc. and verify who I am.
> If you don't stop contacting us, spreading libel about our project members and misinformation about our project, we'll begin contacting organizations/projects where you're involved about the harassment and malicious behavior across platforms towards an open source project.
This is ludicrous. You posted information which I consider to be incorrect about the Librem 5 on this forum and at r/Purism. When I responded to correct the record, you accused me of engaging in "harassment and malicious behavior across platforms towards an open source project".
Everyone can see your behavior and it fits a consistent pattern. You go out of your way to criticize other open source projects on public forums. Then, when people try to respond on the technical points, you accuse people of harassing you and trying to harm your project, which is simply not true. Responding to the technical points that you raised on a public forum is not an attempt to "contact" you or members of your project and it certainly is not "harassment" as you term it.
> The Librem 5 hardware is also just as much of a black box. It's 100% as proprietary. It does not have firmware or hardware that's any more open and this is a blatant lie. Them marketing the hardware as being more open is thoroughly unethically and dishonest. They've done the same with their laptops and other products, which has done immense harm to projects like Talos actually trying to produce open hardware in any actual sense of the word.
There is a major difference between the openness of the Librem 5 (L5) vs Android phones. The L5 is the first phone with free/open source schematics (GPL 3.0) for its circuit boards since the Golden Delicious GTA04A4 which was released in Jan 2012. Purism has only released the STL files for the L5's case and the board schematics in PDF, so it would take some work to recreate the original CAD files, but anybody can legally reproduce the hardware in the L5. To find a phone which released its CAD files, you have to go back to the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner released in June 2008.
Purism has also released the board view images to show where components are placed on the L5's boards. You may be able to find the board view for a few models (such as iPhones), because they get leaked, but as far as I know, no Android phone manufacturer publicly releases the board views of their circuit boards.
If your argument is that the circuit boards don't matter, because most of the functionality is locked up in proprietary chips, then let's look at the chips that Purism selected and see if there's a difference. Qualcomm, MediaTek, UNISOC and Samsung don't release the documentation for their mobile application processors without an NDA, and Apple and Huawei don't release their documentation on their chips to any outside companies as far as I know. In contrast, NXP released 7000 pages of documentation plus their Android and Linux software for the i.MX 8M Quad to anyone who registers on their website. They restrict the security manual to only certain approved people, but everything else can be obtained and NXP has a public forum where anyone can ask questions about their i.MX processors. Likewise, Thales releases the documentation on the PLS8 cellular modem and provides a public forum.
Android phones commonly have a locked bootloader which prevents the user from changing the OS. All Huawei and Apple phones have the bootloader locked. Most Samsung phone require using an unauthorized crack. Motorola and Xiaomi require applying for an unlock code code and waiting up to two weeks for it and using it voids the hardware's warranty. Sony makes it easy but voids the warranty. Google also makes it easy, but won't honor the warranty unless the Pixel is reflashed to the original OS and relocked. In contrast, the Librem 5 has such restrictions.
Another issue is the drivers and kernels. Qualcomm has the best track record of the major mobile SoC manufacturers since it provides public access and the commit record to its kernel source code at Code Aurora, but the community has to take that code and adapt it to work in mainline Linux and it often takes 3 or 4 years to fully support Snapdragons. Samsung has done better in recent years, but MediaTek, UNISOC, Huawei and Apple are horrible. However, NXP is far better than all these since it commits directly to mainline Linux and is willing to work with the community to support its chips.
Purism develops its code in public and encourages its developers to interact with the community. All the firmware in the L5 is proprietary, but it is worth mentioning that Purism is planning on using FOSS firmware in its secondary Cortex processor to control the smartcard reader. Also the OpenPGP specification is open, so anyone can study it.
I would argue that all of these things add up to make the Librem 5 the most open phone that can be bought today (with the PinePhone a close second). I have a problem with some of Purism's marketing, like the "100% made in the USA electronics" slogan for the Librem 5 USA, but you have to look at this in the context of the actual mobile industry and what is possible in the real world. Sure it would be great to have a phone with open hardware chips, but you are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars to develop those chips and paying hundreds of millions more to license the necessary IP, which is totally unrealistic.
> Linux doesn't mean systemd, polkit, glibc, GCC, binutils, GNOME, pulseaudio/pipewire, Wayland/X11, etc. It makes no sense to claim these are Linux phones when the vast majority of smartphones run Linux. It's marketing spin. If you want to call it a GNU/Linux phone, go ahead, but what you're doing is a deliberate attempt at misleading people on their part.
I was simply following the standard convention of saying "Linux" to mean the entire OS that is found in popular distros like Debian, Arch and Fedora, whereas people generally say "Linux kernel" to refer to just the kernel. Saying "GNU/Linux" is problematic because most distros contain software which isn't part of GNU and isn't approved by the FSF, but I will use that term for lack of a better one.
By the way, it is just as problematic to say that GrapheneOS is "Linux" because GrapheneOS is using a kernel which has been substantially modified by Google, and Qualcomm's drivers for the Snapdragon which GrapheneOS uses are only designed to support an Android kernel, not a mainline Linux kernel. GrapheneOS doesn't use mainline Linux kernels and it usually takes 3-4 years for the mainline kernel to fully support new Snapdragons after they are released, so I don't know why you are even bothering to make this argument.
> There's a far larger and better ecosystem of open source apps for Android than there is for the products that you're marketing...
Just to be clear, I'm simply a customer of Purism and PINE64 who owns the Librem 5 USA and PinePhone, so I don't represent these companies and I'm not marketing their products.
I'm not sure whether there is a larger ecosystem of open source apps for Android rather than the GNU/Linux distros that run on the Librem 5 and PinePhone. If we are talking about apps which are designed to run on mobile phones, then you have a point, since it will take a while to adapt all the desktop software to be mobile-friendly, but Kirigami or libhandy/libadwaita is getting added to a lot GNU/Linux desktop software to make it adaptive. Google purposely does not label software with FOSS licenses in the Play Store, so it is hard to count the number of FOSS apps for Android. I count 4472 apps in F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/repo/index-v1.jar), whereas Debian 11 "bullseye" (which is what PureOS and Mobian are based on) has 59,551 packages. I know that not all FOSS apps make it into the F-Droid repo and the Debian repo includges the entire operating system and many of its applications use multiple packages, so we are comparing apples and oranges, but I don't see much evidence that the Android FOSS ecosystem is "larger and better" than the GNU/Linux ecosystem.
I often find that I need to install proprietary apps when using LineageOS because I can't find what I need in F-Droid, whereas I generally don't install proprietary apps in my GNU/Linux systems, so from that point of view, GNU/LInux is "better". Also a sizeable number of the FOSS apps that I encounter in F-Droid contain some code which was originally written for GNU/Linux, whereas I rarely find code in GNU/Linux which was originally written for Android.
> This is not accurate. It still has an SoC with a ton of components aside from the SoC despite your inaccurate claim that it doesn't, and those components still need to be isolated with an IOMMU.
I stated that "the Librem 5 doesn't need an IOMMU" to isolate the WiFi/BT, cellular modem, GNSS and USB controller, but in case you are worried, the i.MX 8M Quad SoC in the Librem 5 does have a Resource Domain Controller (RDC), Arm TrustZone and On-chip RAM (OCRAM) secure region protection, which does isolate the CPU, GPU and VPU. See section "3.2.2.4 Resource Domain Control and Security Considerations" in the "i.MX 8M Dual/8M QuadLite/8M Quad Applications Processors Reference Manual". (NXP requires registration to download the manual.)
> Those are minimum guarantees of full security updates, not end-of-life dates and the number of days you get those for the Librem 5 is ZERO. The only recommended devices for GrapheneOS are the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, which means that there is at least 5 years of full security updates for the devices we support.
The GrapheneOS FAQ lists the Pixel 3a released in May 2019 as a "supported" device, but the Pixel 3 released in October 2018 is listed as "end-of-life" because it no longer gets full security updates, so that tells me that most people are using GrapheneOS on devices that have a 3 year lifespan.
I downloaded the Pixel 3a's "bonito" kernel (https://github.com/GrapheneOS/device_google_bonito-kernel) and I see that it is using kernel version 4.9.292. Mainline Linux 4.9.292 was released on 2021-12-08 and 4.9.0 was released on 2016-12-11. Call me crazy but I prefer to use an up-to-date mainline kernel rather than one that is over 5 years old and takes 3 months to get the latest security patches from kernel.org. (To be fair, I should mention that the Librem 5 issn't yet fully supported in mainline Linux, so you can't run the latest mainline kernel on day one of its release, but the Purism devs say that mainline support is coming.)
> Your claim of lifetime security updates is completely bogus and demonstrates the extreme lengths Purism goes to in order to mislead people and profit from it.
Purism says that it went way over-budget trying to develop the Librem 5 and its software, which is why it has been raising its prices. Considering the roughly 20 companies that lost their shirts in the past when trying to develop mobile Linux, it is unrealistic to think that Purism is doing this for profit. (See: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/mobile-linux-tra...)
Granted that NXP will stop providing firmware updates for the i.MX 8M Quad in 2033, and I expect that the firmware updates will end much sooner than that for the RS9116 WiFi/BT, BM818 cellular modem, Tesio-Liv3 GNSS, etc, but there is no reason to not expect lifetime software updates, because the Librem 5 should soon have mainline Linux support. Purism has worked hard to upstream its code changes to parent projects (Linux, wlroots, geoclue, ModemManager, GTK, GNOME libraries, GNOME applications, etc.), so that future releases of these projects should run on the Librem 5 with minimal work. Phosh was designed as a thin overlay on top of standard GNOME libraries and applications (which have substantial support from IBM/Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and Google) and roughly 176k of the roughly 250k lines of code that Purism has created for the Librem 5 are now incorporated as official GNOME projects. (see: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2021/12/15/amount-code-libr... ) What this means is that it shouldn't cost Purism much to keep providing future software updates. In addition, postmarketOS and Mobian developers are now participating in the development of Phosh which has become the most popular interface among PinePhone users, so even if Purism dies as a company, it is likely that the community will maintain the interface. For more info, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
> More developers are familiar with Android than the desktop Linux software stack. More work goes into it. Far more apps are written for it, and that includes a very active open source app ecosystem.
The problem is that the Android app ecosystem has a very large number of apps which are based on collecting users' personal information and violating people's privacy, and it is hard for a normal user to avoid all the spyware and malware in Android. In my experience using CyanogenMod/LineageOS and the F-Droid repo since 2015, I inevitably fall back to installing some proprietary apps when using AOSP-derivatives, whereas my PinePhone and Librem 5 USA only have FOSS apps and drivers installed on them. If the goal is to use FOSS as much as possible, you are better off buying a Linux phone in my opinion.
By the way, one of the apps that I helped develop is on F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ketanolab.nusimi/ ) and I have given workshops on how to install LineageOS on phones, so I speak as someone who tries to promote the use of FOSS on Android phones, but the phone industry does put up a lot of barriers to make it difficult to install AOSP-derivatives.
> GrapheneOS only supports devices with proper security support for all the firmware, drivers, etc. and again there are no closed source kernel drivers. We can support pretty much any mobile device with alternate OS support since any serious one will have AOSP support. Most devices have lackluster security and don't meet our requirements.
The problem is that Google only sells Pixels in a very limited number of countries. Whereas Purism offers free worldwide shipping for the Librem 5, the Pixel 6 is only being sold in 8 countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, UK, USA), so your security requirements exclude over 90% of the world's population from being able to use GrapheneOS. Plus, many people don't want to financially support a company like Google which is based on Surveillance Capitalism.
> We're working with a hardware vendor to get a non-Pixel phone actually meeting reasonable security requirements.
Good to hear. I look forward to seeing it.
> Librem 5 has a bunch of components where they are not shipping updates.
Not true. Purism has promised to provide updates to the proprietary firmware on the Librem 5, and already provides instructions for how to update the firmware on the WiFi/BT and USB controller. See: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
> It has a bunch of poorly secured and insecurely configured legacy hardware often without proper updates available
What are you talking about? Purism purposely designed the Librem 5 to avoid planned obsolescence, so it looked for component suppliers who support their hardware for a long time. For example, NXP guarantees that that it will provide updates for the i.MX 8M Quad for 15 years (Jan. 2018 - Jan. 2033). See: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
In contrast, Google only promises to provide 3 years of OS updates and security updates for the Pixel 3/4/5, and 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates for the Pixel 6. Qualcomm announced in Dec. 2020 that it will support its Snapdragon processors (which are used in Pixel devices) for 3 years of Android updates and 4 years of security updates.
Linux phones like the Librem 5 and PinePhone use separate components which are supported for many years by the manufacturers, whereas most Android phones (like the Pixels) use integrated mobile system-on-chips which are only manufactured for 1-2 years and only supported for 3-4 years by the manufacturer. Because Linux phones use components with long-term support by the component suppliers, the Librem 5 is the first phone to be sold with the guarantee of lifetime software updates, and PINE64 promised to manufacture the PinePhone for 5 years, which is longer than any other smartphone ever sold.
> components that are not properly isolated via IOMMU,
The Librem 5 doesn't need an IOMMU, because it uses separated components, and it uses serial buses (USB 2.0/3.0, SDIO, I2C and I2S) that don't allow direct memory access, so there is absolute no chance of the WiFi/BT, cellular modem, GNSS and USB controller being able to access the RAM or the SoC's cache. Unlike the Snapdragon processors in Pixels whose hardware is essentially a black box, we can independently verify by looking at the open source schematics that direct memory access is not possible in the Librem 5.
> but there are years and years of tons of important privacy/security work done in a systemic way across hardware/firmware/software which are missing there before worrying about stuff like that.
If you are talking about kernel hardening and running each app in its own sandbox with its own UID, then I would agree that Android/AOSP has more security features than Debian/PureOS, but the problem with your argument is that you are ignoring the fact that a mountain of spyware and malware has been created for the Android platform and users have to be very vigilant to not install any of it. According to AV-TEST, 3.38M pieces of malware and 3.18M potentially unwanted apps (mostly spyware) were created for the Android platform in 2021, whereas it is unlikely that any of that garbage will get into the Debian->PureOS repos to ever effect users of the Librem 5. Linux users rarely install anything from outside their distro's repo, whereas I often find myself installing apps whose code I can't verify when I use AOSP-derivatives because I can't find all the apps that I need in F-Droid.
Yes, Android/AOSP does have a lot more security built into its design than Debian->PureOS, but it is based on a model of letting all sorts of unverifiable and dangerous code run inside it. For more on the Librem 5's security, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
> Marketing something as private/secure and spreading tons of misinformation and outright lies about the mainstream options
Care to provide any evidence to prove that Purism or its employees are "spreading tons of misinformation and outright lies about the mainstream options"?
@anw, According to the Purism forum, the shipping queue for the Librem 5 has reached people who pre-ordered on October 20-25, 2017, so you should have gotten your phone by now. You should contact Purism support to ask about your order. See: https://forums.puri.sm/t/estimate-your-librem-5-shipping/112...
It depends on your goals. If you donate to the GNOME Foundation, your donation won't help develop Phosh (which is the leading mobile Linux interface according to 3 different PinePhone user surveys) and it probably won't be used to make GTK/GNOME ecosystem become adaptive and mobile-friendly. If your goal is to advance mobile Linux on the GTK/GNOME/Phosh platform, then ordering the Librem 5 is the best way to get funds to the 10 software devs working on it at Purism. See: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
I own both the PinePhone and Librem 5 USA, and I'm seriously impressed by the amount of work the Purism devs do for PinePhone users (who are the majority of the Phosh users).
As for Xiaomi being comically large, I found the mid-range Samsung and Motorola models to have larger bezels and to generally be larger for similar specs when I bought my Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 a couple years ago. The reality is that the majority of phones from Motorola, Xiaomi, LG and Nokia are designed and manufactured by 3 Chinese ODMs (Wingtech, Huaquin and Longcheer), and even 20% of Samsung's phones come from these 3 ODMs. See: https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2021/12/10/comparing-l5-and...
Let me state for the record that I have no financial stake in Purism, and I do not represent the company. I am simply a customer of the company who tries to correct the misinformation that I see being posted about the Librem 5 on public forums like this one, because I think that Purism is doing important development work for mobile Linux. I am using my real name "Amos Batto", and anyone who does a simple internet search can find my personal blog, my github page, my facebook page, etc. and verify who I am.
> If you don't stop contacting us, spreading libel about our project members and misinformation about our project, we'll begin contacting organizations/projects where you're involved about the harassment and malicious behavior across platforms towards an open source project.
This is ludicrous. You posted information which I consider to be incorrect about the Librem 5 on this forum and at r/Purism. When I responded to correct the record, you accused me of engaging in "harassment and malicious behavior across platforms towards an open source project".
Everyone can see your behavior and it fits a consistent pattern. You go out of your way to criticize other open source projects on public forums. Then, when people try to respond on the technical points, you accuse people of harassing you and trying to harm your project, which is simply not true. Responding to the technical points that you raised on a public forum is not an attempt to "contact" you or members of your project and it certainly is not "harassment" as you term it.