On Tuesday 14. May 2019 08.52.29 Bernhard E. Reiter wrote: > Am Freitag 10 Mai 2019 17:06:40 schrieb Paul Boddie: > > it surprises me that they have not managed to > > attract broader publicity. > > Shiftphones seem to focus on Germany (or German speaking companies). > It is a significant invest to create text and give support in a second > language.
Agreed. But it still surprises me that a wider audience were not aware of it, not through any efforts of the company targeting other countries and audiences (or not doing so), but simply because word does get around. > > My understanding (and recollection) is that Fairphone fell into the same > > "original design manufacturer" trap that lots of people do. Now, most > > vendors do not care about the lack of longevity of the thing that they > > have procured: they can always sell or give an unhappy customer the next > > thing coming out of the factory. > > In my perception Fairphone aimed for an improvement in longevity of their > product and were successful. The Fairphone 2 was produced and on sale for > about 30 something month. Fairphone 2 is still supported with software updates, as I understand it. This is obviously a good thing and it may even be a notable thing in the mobile industry and in consumer electronics where the manufacturers have an incentive to sell customers a new model rather than support existing ones. I was looking at update and source code availability for certain phone manufacturers only yesterday, and despite various practical challenges, it did seem to be possible to get updates for older models from certain manufacturers. For example, bq models seem to have relatively recent source code and firmware updates. However, the aim should be for indefinite support: that is, support for the software should continue until nobody is practically able or willing to produce updates. Economic factors play a part here, clearly, because if there is continual churn in the code, lots of work is needed to prepare, test and deploy updates. Here, something could very easily be said about software engineering (or lack of it) causing such labour-intensive processes and discouraging sustained support of deployed software. But other aspects, like a lack of standardisation of the hardware (with a tendency for each new product to be different and special and thus merit a completely new software effort) and proprietary/secretive hardware that only the manufacturer is able to support (with no incentive to do so once newer products are available), undermine or defeat any independent efforts to support software. Despite Free Software being used, end-users are being denied control by selfish interests. And let us not forget that some manufacturers simply deny end-users the right to exercise the privileges granted in the Free Software licensing used in those manufacturers' products. Such behaviour is an affront to our principles and what organisations like the FSFE stand for, and yet such behaviour was practically excused within the Linux kernel development community, especially in the upper levels of it, because we should supposedly be happy that Free Software is being widely used. Again, what good is Free Software if the end- user never gets all the promised benefits? > > a Free Software initiative would have encountered software sustainability > > issues at the first hurdle, giving them the opportunity to back up and > > choose a different approach. > > When trying to get a product out of the doors, you face a large number of > small and larger decisions. First of all, the product has to "work" for the > expected usage. Fairphone 1 was good in this regard, but Fairphone 2 a bit > less so. Backing up and taking more time may have not been possible, without > risking to not have a product at all. Which would have been the worst > result. So to me your criticism is too harsh. After all they produced two > phones that were significant steps forward. I think my criticism is harsh, but it demonstrates that Fairphone were not "a Free Software initiative" because they did not give the issue of the software the priority it deserved, at least for the first product. And due to the way software and services are being developed and delivered nowadays, software viability has probably become the primary limit to product longevity (perhaps alongside battery degradation and other "repairability" issues that Fairphone have also confronted, to their credit). > If we had more manufactures trying to go in the Fairphone direction, it > would foster much more Free Software usages on mobile devices. It is fine > to point out how they could do better, but I think we should even more > applaude them for the advances. Yes, I recognise their achievements. And they have improved with regard to the software, meaning that I look forward to what they produce next. > > Naturally, the whole mobile industry suffers from these issues, too: it is > > like the Wintel upgrade treadmill turbo-upgraded for the 21st century. As > > software practitioners, we should be looking to offer real solutions for > > this. > > I agree, thought we first must understand the real reasons behind fast > upgrades. Some customers are very happy about a new model each year and > they'll buy it. I am sure they are. These are presumably the same apologists for phone manufacturers trying to cut warranty terms where I live: people who openly said that they bought a new phone every six months, that longer warranties would make phones more expensive, and that nobody needed them anyway (presumably because at six months, they would sell their phone to some hapless buyer or fake up some kind of insurance claim). The problem is that we have to share a planet with idiots like this, with their behaviour validating the destructive and wasteful actions of corporations who are not being held responsible for the consequences of their "need" to make money. With many other technological phenomena, the functional reasons for upgrading diminish over time as everything becomes "good enough". Sadly, in the spirit of the Wintel upgrade treadmill, the need to upgrade is seemingly driven by wasteful software and services. So, we just have a bunch of different people enabling each other's destructive behaviour while everyone else is made to think that the problem is too complicated to be solved. I don't think any of us with a conscience should allow this situation to persist, particularly as we are fully aware of things that can be components in an eventual solution. > > Why shouldn't my next phone be usable, even in a modest sense, for as > > long as my current one, which is actually fifteen years old? > > One thing is technical progress, there is 5G coming and at some point you'll > may need a phone that uses the standard. Another example there are websites > or services that you would want to use, that only run with hardware and > software that is newer. Well, my current phone is only capable of 2G, and although that may go away in some places - probably the US with its own peculiar heritage - it will probably remain viable for a few more years. But technical progress is not really any justification. As I have noted above and elsewhere, many services do not need even more bandwidth and even more performance. It is the same mutually destructive reinforcement seen in the prime of the Wintel relationship, where people make elaborate but flawed software to use up the extra performance which then drives hardware development to compensate for things getting slower and slower. This might be great if we were talking about immersive holographic environments or something exotic, but when it comes to putting a few things into text fields, pressing a button, and seeing a list of things to buy, it just drives obsolescence and waste. > > where the people trying to make > > such phones are outsiders and are not part of the manufacturer ecosystem, > > with its convenient and cheap access to knowledge and technical resources, > > and so on. And getting access to the right people to solve problems is > > difficult given the low volumes and outsider status of such initiatives. > > What I've heard from the OpenMoko project and others is that you cannot get > the top line of SOCs from manufactures in small numbers. Something like > you'll have to buy 10.000 at least and then put the money down up-front. > Knownn the right people won't help with that. True. So as I noted there are numerous obstacles. Independent initiatives are locked out in purchasing terms (prohibitive minimum order quantities), logistical terms (they do not have convenient, insider access to production facilities), and collaborative terms (they do not have in-house access to the designers and people who can make up for incomplete documentation and provide useful, informal knowledge). > > I was actually surprised in my review of available phones that Fairphone 2 > > is now no longer available, although factory-refurbished ones can be > > obtained for a discount. > > This is a recent development (in the last weeks). > Probably a good one, a Fairphone 3 is needed for a while now. > > > What might have been interesting is if the modular > > technology had been popularised, shared, standardised, and so on, so that > > others could have made upgrades and continued the general availability of > > the product. > > You know that all this would have meant significant efforts and Fairphone is > a small company (in a growth phase, with all the pain coming with it). At > least they have shown that it works and there is a market for it (even when > small). This is a large archievement. I agree. I hope they can demonstrate collaboration with others with aligned interests precisely because addressing all of the different issues is really too challenging for a small organisation. Paul _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
