Which phone should I buy for running Replicant?

[Paul Sokolovsky]

Hello,

On Wed, 25 Sep 2013 17:03:22 +0200
"Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller" <hns at goldelico.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Am 25.09.2013 um 16:45 schrieb Dmitriy Nikandrov:
> 
> > I hope somewhere in the world exist investor with about $100 mil. to
> 
> me too :) But he/she did not show up in the past 10 years. Even
> Canonical did not want to invest their own money for the Ubuntu Edge
> (except for running the indiegogo campaign).

Well, that's exactly the idea of organizer(s) of
http://rhombus-tech.net/ . They even have non-nonsense business plan:
start with existing cost-competetive and "open enough" SoCs, design,
produce, and market open-hardware/software (but mass-market) products
based on it, as a customer try to affect FOSS compliance of SoC vendor
in the meantime. Then, when they earn a dozen of millions, order
production of actual open-hardware silicon and market that.

Granted, they're at the very beginning of the road, and their progress
is awfully slow, but at least after 2+ years they're finally not
complete vaporware and have sent boards to the early adopters.

>
> > solve this equation & give the begining to such very new computing
> > ecosystem, where all components are free & open.
> 
> But again there is an equation which has no solutions:
> 
> investor + free&open = 2
> 
> I.e. why should someone invest into freedom and openness
> if it is easier to get a return of investment with closed systems?
> 
> This would be against fundamental laws of economics. More specifically
> Venture Capital invests to 50% in patents and 50% into a certain
> mindset of people. Rarely into ideas. And not in concepts like
> "freedom". They leave that to polictical discussions.

Well, optimistic capitalist PR rambles something about freedom of
choice and innovation (which can be rephrased as looking for new
capital markets). It must have been really stupid to invest into some
"lectricity" instead of producing candles of more shapes, colors, and
smells, and yet someone did.

Btw, if you look at it carefully, movement to hardware "openness" goes
from both sides. Above is a completely grassroot project dreaming of
carving a niche to complete with Intel & ARM, hoping that their product
will be more cost-effective and market share self-sustaining because of
open licensing. But there're also http://www.opencompute.org/ or
recently announced http://open-power.org/ . Such projects look
rather stupid from little guy's perspective, but well, they're
targeted at corporate types. Even if 90% of them are just usual
corporate alliances du jour, 10% is still that "open" rhetoric which
changes "mindset of people".

So, maybe when rhombus-tech.net will have 5 millions and will come to
VC and say "hey, IBM and friends have their OpenPower, and we'll have
our OpenOpenRISC", maybe they'll get what they want. In 10 years there
will be definitely obvious changes, and in 20 years, everything may be
completely different.

> 
> So as you say, we would need a completely different ecosystem
> where people help each other and free of charge :(
> 
> Or where people are willing (and able - from well enough paid work...)
> to pay more than for a closed device. I.e. if not 1 person is
> investing $100 mil. but 100 mil persons are investing $1.
> 
> For software (FLOSS) it works because the investment that
> is needed is very low. Just some spare time and
> curiousity/knowledge/ingenuity.
> 
> -- hns
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-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com