I'm with you there in not really buying into the whole security, trust, and ethics story line which mostly seems to be appealing to a bandwagon of sentiments around corporate and government spying. Unfortunately, these sentiments are probably the only reason otherwise-average people - the kind of people who don't care about recompiling the kernel for their phone, on their phone, or jiggling GPIOs to remove power from subsystems - would probably buy anything other than an Android or Apple phone. Without this both comparatively large in one respect (with respect to the set of all reasonably tech-savvy people) but comparatively minuscule in another (with respect to the set of all smartphone consumers) set of people, you're going to end up with another OpenMoko Freerunner type situation where the only people using it are the frankly ultra-fringe types like us who care more about having a pocket computer that behaves like, well, an actual computer should and are frustrated with the creative limitations of SDK-based lock-in.
I sometimes wonder how much Purism actually cares about all this security, trust, ethics rhetoric and how much of it is a bunch of geeks who just want to finally have a smartphone which can run an actual Linux distribution and figured "hey, consumers are pretty riled-up about this whole government spying thing - and it's pretty easy to audit open source software for that sort of stuff - maybe we can work an angle..."
> Unfortunately, these sentiments are probably the only reason otherwise-average people - the kind of people who don't care about recompiling the kernel for their phone, on their phone,
I guess that's true, but these people probably will not be the driving force of the community around the phone. They'll be helping sustain the vendor financially, which is also valuable though.
I already have a mobile device to play with with a similar design to this phone, that has a separate 3G modem and can also be made to make calls. It's a bulkier 7" tablet. It will never get an opensource GPU driver, and suspend to ram is also out of the question for now. But it's fun to play with and explore.
Recently, I had fun with adding touch UI support for u-boot, to implement a boot menu and some battery indicator:
Also if you drop the typical Linux userspace, and replace systemd with a custom init binary, create a DRI based UI app it's possible to get cold boot times to useable GUI in 1-2 seconds from pressing a button. So I'm excited for what will be possible to do if the hardware of that phone ever materializes.
I sometimes wonder how much Purism actually cares about all this security, trust, ethics rhetoric and how much of it is a bunch of geeks who just want to finally have a smartphone which can run an actual Linux distribution and figured "hey, consumers are pretty riled-up about this whole government spying thing - and it's pretty easy to audit open source software for that sort of stuff - maybe we can work an angle..."