Comment by JohnFen
7 years ago
I'm not sure that what Canonical can or can't do has much bearing on what others can or can't do. I also don't think that the number of employees means all that much. Very often, smaller teams can be more focused and able to accomplish more than larger teams.
Yeah, let me know when less than 25 developers crank out a working mobile Linux distro that will continue to be supported in 5 years. Looking at all the failed projects in the past and all the managements complexities like software support, modern touch integration this is virtually impossible. They'll likely have a brief stint releasing some Debian ARM based mobile OS with a limited selection of software. You'll get some GTK Calendar, Calculator, etc. The basic crap that imitates Android phones from 2011. And it will be supported by up to 5 or so devices, hopefully without some impractical rooting method.
Linux barely exists as a desktop operating system as is. The only difference nowadays is smartphones don't have that freedom of customization desktops provide. Smartphones are consumer centric devices, you can't even swap batteries anymore. Leading OEMs have no interest in supporting an obscure operating system, they know the majority of users want Android.
When Purism releases this as an OOTB product, it will without a doubt run on some no named Chinese Phone that holds the mediocre power of any low end Android Device. Only it will be $600, rather than $180
The mobile phone market is already slowing down. Just like PC market did years ago.
When it gets stagnant, companies will stop innovating that hard and slowly but steadily open solutions will gain quality and feature parity.
If in 10 years I get an open phone with the features close to what I have today, I'd be pretty happy. Because I just don't think phones today are going to be that different in 10 years.
You are right that Linux Desktop barely has any market share. But it's a very viable solution and I'd personally argue that it's ahead of it's competition.
I don't know exactly what you mean by slowing down, but I'm going to assume you mean innovation, like you say later. There I agree because not much has changed. There was a funny phone commercial a few months back where they pretty much admitted nothings changed since 2007.
It makes sense that stagnant progress leads to open solutions because as hardware advances, alternative technologies become less challenging to implement. I'm sure as you know, there was a time when running a real time OS like Unix on a personal computer was impossible, now it's on our routers.
Back to this Librem Phone, it seems the only selling point for it's massive price tag is being libre, and non-surveillance. But for a modern smartphone to be functional it's gotta be connected to a cellular tower which is definitely using some type of monitoring system.
What exactly do you mean by Linux is ahead of its competition?
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This isn't a distro, but it is something at least equally complex. The company that I currently work for is a leader in our industry (I'm being intentionally vague here for legal reasons), producing very complex enterprise software for large customers. The entire company, not just the dev team, is less than 25 people.
The company has been doing this for roughly 30 years.
The size of a company is not irrelevant to what a company can do, of course, but it's also not determinative.