My first KDE sprint. I am glad that It finally happened!

A day before I left for Berlin, I did not even have my VISA. Well, everything from getting the VISA to booking the flight tickets and finally packing the bags happened a day before I left for Berlin

We all landed in Berlin on 6th, a day before the sprint started. I think we all took a lot of rest that day because most of us were tired with all the traveling. We all met on 7th Morning at the reception of the hotel we were staying in where I finally got to meet people I only knew through IRC nick names. From there we headed to have some breakfast and finally to Endocode where our sprint took place.

Before we started working on our tasks, we had discussions regarding how to make the KDE Edu website better, making applications easily accessible to Universities/schools etc. We prepared a list of tasks that could be done during the sprint and finally started working on them.

I mostly worked on Cantor,completing some part of what I could not complete during GSoC. After a few discussions and help from my mentor Filipe, I merged some of my to work  to qprocess_port branch   and started working on polishing the R backend of Cantor. Filipe plans to release a new version in December, for which he plans to merge my work for R backend to master and for that to happen I need to make the syntax highlighter and tab completion of R backend work. I completed some part of it during the sprint.

I also had discussion with Timothee regarding GCompris-Server , showed him my work and discussed what should be the next step for it

Well, that’s all I did. I had a great time throughout the sprint and It was a pleasure meeting fellow KDE developers and specially my mentors Filipe and  Timothee

Here’s a picture we took(without Aleix and David)  just outside of where Qt world summit happened. Aleix was finding a new place to stay(If i remember correctly) and David had some other work.

Big Thank you to KDE e.V. board for sponsoring my trip and Endocode for providing us a office and access to unlimited drinks and a weird bottle opener

Intro

Almost three months after Akademy 2017, I finally found the time to write a blog post about how I experienced it.

Akademy is where I learn again about all the amazing things happening in our community, where I connect the dots and see the big picture of where all the effort in the various projects together can lead. And of course, I meet all the wonderful people, all the individual reasons why being in KDE is so amazing. This year was no different.

Some people voiced their concern during the event that those who are not at Akademy and see only pictures of it on social media might get the feeling that it is mostly about hanging out on the beach and drinking beer, instead of actually being productive. Everyone who was ever at Akademy of course knows this impression couldn’t be further from the truth, but I’ll still take it as a reason to not talk about any of the things that were “just” fun, and focus instead on those that were both fun and productive.

Tales from the KDE e.V. Board of Directors

One thing that happens at every Akademy is the Annual General Assembly (AGM) of the KDE e.V.

This association, usually just called “the e.V.” by the community, is KDE’s legal and financial representation. Among other things, it raises funds and uses them to make in-person meetings within KDE happen, such as developer sprints or conferences, and sponsor attendees who cannot afford travel and accommodation for those themselves. It also takes care of legal issues such as maintaining KDE’s trademarks, and this year it also uses some of its funds for two marketing contractors, Ivana and Paul, to help push our promo efforts. Since last Akademy I am on the board of directors of the KDE e.V., so the AGM is especially important to me.

One important aspect of this year’s AGM was that three out of the five positions in the board of directors were up for re-election. Two of the board members whose terms ended, our president Lydia Pintscher and vice president Aleix Pol, ran for another term and were re-elected, whereas Marta Rybczynska was not able to run for another term as treasurer, and is now followed by Eike Hein. Eike used to be one of the “KDE phantoms”: He’s been a very active KDE contributor for many years (most notably the maintainer of Konversation, Yakuake and several key parts of Plasma such as the Task Manager), but the majority of his fellow KDE members have not seen him in person until this year.

The new board (from the left): Eike, yours truly, Aleix, Lydia and Sandro

Fortunately I had the opportunity to talk to Eike more than anybody else at this Akademy because we had been assigned as roommates. He had lots of interesting stories to tell, from the way IRC facilitates building communities, to communication culture in Korea (where he now lives), to the experience of moderating multiple Subreddits, and much much more. I’m really looking forward to working with Eike on the board!

My highlights from two days of talks

The following are explicitly my personal highlights. If you’re a non-programmer like me, who is also especially interested in design and/or in KDE software running on anything that isn’t a traditional desktop or laptop PC, chances are you might find those talks as interesting as I did. If you know more about programming than I do, you’d also enjoy a lot of the other presentations, where I could just sit and be amazed by how people like you can understand all of that technical stuff.

So, here goes:

Aleix Pol’s talk about A laptop by KDE  summarized our experience with the KDE Slimbook, the very first KDE-branded hardware on the market, and gave a few ideas on what we might do next in that area. This was especially important to me because I was deeply involved in promoting the KDE Slimbook initiative. The talk was followed up by a BoF session during the week where we did an in-depth retrospective on how the Slimbook project went so far and what we learned from it.

A talk which was especially relevant for me as a user researcher was the one on (K)UserFeedback, where Volker Krause introduced the new framework that allows applications to – after opt-in and fully anonymized, of course – collect usage data and send them to KDE to use it for improving our software. Given that privacy is at the core of our Vision and Mission, of course we are extremely cautious in that area, but some usage data is needed for us to make software that fits the needs of our users, not just our own. Volker’s talk was accompanied by a BoF on Tuesday where we discussed what our policy on collection, storage and use of that data should look like in order gain useful information without compromising our users’ privacy.

A talk which was interesting for me from a strategic, design and user perspective was the one about Mycroft AI Plasmoid & Plasma Desktop Integration, in which Aditya Mehra presented some of the amazing things the Mycroft AI can already do in Plasma, as well as his plans for the future. Digital Assistants are one area where the Linux desktops clearly lag behind all big proprietary operating systems. Many Free Software proponents reject digital assistants outright due to a perceived inherent privacy problem, but Mycroft (apart from currently using a Google service for speech recognition, but there are plans to replace that) shows that privacy-protecting and fully user-controlled digital assistants are possible. That is why from my perspective, this is a hugely important strategic area for KDE. This talk was also accompanied by a BoF on Tuesday, about where else in Plasma we can use Mycroft’s capabilities. If you are as excited as I am about the role KDE could play in Free Software solutions for AI and home automation, consider participating in the discussion on my community goal proposal on that subject.

Aditya giving his talk about Mycroft

In his talk Opening new doors: KDE in embedded, Agustin Benito Bethencourt presented some of the ways in which KDE could play an important role in the world of embedded systems, for example in the automobile industry. He has been involved in two different projects in that area and told us that the industry is waking up to the benefits of open source, and that from his perspective, now would be a great time for KDE to make ourselves known in that space. This talk, too, was accompanied by a BoF session, where we discussed next steps for getting our software to run on automotive systems. This is also an area where I believe it’s important that KDE champions Fee Software, because, like with virtual assistants: What have we won if our PCs and phones run Free Software, but our cars are not in our full control and might even spy on us? If you are interested in this project, head over to the Automotive project on Phabricator and join the discussion and work there!

In his talk Looking for Love, our marketing contractor Paul Brown taught us the importance of focusing our communication strategy on the users’ needs, by presenting, in clear and easy to understand words, what benefit our products bring to them, instead of trying to describe their purpose as precisely as possible from our own perspective. That he took the Kirigami wiki page, which I had contributed significantly to, as a negative example of a description which uses way too much jargon and focuses on technical details instead of user benefits, of course meant that I had to endure seeing one of my “babies” being ripped apart in front of my eyes, but it was definitely worth it! The talk was meant as an appetizer for a workshop on Monday, were Paul helped everyone who wanted to improve their product website.

In his talk Input Methods in Plasma 5, Eike Hein made it clear that the state of input methods (which are needed primarily for text input in e.g. many Asian writing systems, but can also handle things such as emoji input or auto-completion or -correction) in Plasma and KDE applications is currently lagging behind other popular operating systems and desktop environments. He presented what needs to be done to improve the situation, and is now rallying people behind a proposal for a community goal to make it happen together. So here as well: If you also feel that improving input methods in KDE software is important, join the conversation on the proposal!

Camilo Higuita, author of the Babe music player, gave a talk Introducing Babe and a contextual approach to multimedia desktop apps where he demonstrated how Babe uses various techniques and online services to find connections between songs in order to give smart answers to search queries. His talk was also accompanied by a BoF session during the week, where we discussed some design ideas and how to use Kirigami to make Babe a convergent desktop and mobile application.

Yours truly also gave a presentation, together with Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, titled Folding Your Applications, where we talked about the design behind the Kirigami Ui framework and how application developers inside and outside of KDE are already using it to easily create mobile and convergent user interfaces.

Putting Ideas to Action: The Workshop and BoF Days

Monday through Thursday were dedicated to workshops and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, where various groups in KDE – established project teams, groups spontaneously forming around a topic, or often a combination of both – discussed how to drive their ideas forward.

In addition to the already mentioned follow-up sessions to talks from the previous days, these were the sessions that inspired me most:

In the Plasma Mobile part of the Plasma BoF, we learned about Plasma Mobile’s current status and discussed what needs to be done next. There is also a proposed community goal to improve the Plasma Mobile platform for end-user needs, so if you agree with me that Plasma Mobile is of strategic importance to KDE, please participate in the discussion there!

If you ask yourself what the deal is with all those community goals I keep referring to: The initiative to define some concrete mid-term goals for KDE for the next 3-4 years was actually born at Akademy, during a BoF titled ‘”Luminaries” Kabal Proposals’, where Kevin Ottens, Frederik Gladhorn and Mirko Boehm presented to us what came out of their discussion about how they think KDE can be put on the right track towards the future. The goal-setting initiative was one of their proposals. Another one was integrating the KDE e.V. working group reports, which have so far been part of the AGM, into the general conference schedule, allowing people who are not members of the KDE e.V. to learn what’s happening there, as well as significantly shortening the AGM. This proposal will be implemented at next year’s Akademy. Their third proposal, making sure the barrier of entry to contributing to KDE is as low as possible, has been picked up in two goal proposals (which are likely to be merged into one), so, once more: If you agree that this is important for KDE, join the discussion over there!

In a BoF titled “Visual Design Direction”, Andres “Andy” Betts brought up some ideas on how to better integrate designers into the Plasma development process again, and volunteered to spearhead the next round of design improvements. Andy has also submitted a goal proposal related to this, so… you know the drill by now.

BoF wrap-up session, where BoF leaders summarize the results of their session to the rest of the attendees

Closing Words (and a shameless plug)

Now that I’ve advertised various community goal proposals here (one of them being my own), let me use the final paragraph to link to my other proposal, Making KDE software the #1 choice for research and academia. This goal aims to give KDE software the exposure in the research and academic sector that it deserves due to its features and quality, but currently does not have. I think KDE has a lot to offer to researchers, teachers and students, so I’d like us to get in touch with them, promote our software to them and improve it based on their direct feedback. If you agree, participation is welcome!

With hat out of the way, I can summarize that this year’s Akademy was a very successful event, despite being slightly smaller than usual (due to the location being a bit hard to reach and the timing falling into vacation time for many KDE members). I’m now full of enthusiasm again about the things to come for KDE, and looking forward to next year’s Akademy in Vienna!

I had the privilege to attend the KDE Edu sprint in Berlin that happened from the 6th to the 9th of October.

There i mostly worked in the KTuberling port to Android. If you have children (or maybe if you want to feel like one for a few minutes) and an Android device please try it and give some constructive feedback ;)



Though of course that's not all we did, we also had important discussions about "What is kde edu", about how we should be involved in the "Making KDE software the #1 choice for research and academia" KDE goal and other organization stuff like whether we want a phabricator rule to send email to the kdeedu mailing list for a set of projects, etc.



Thanks go to all the people that donate to KDE e.V. that made sponsoring the trip possible, and to Endocode for hosting us and sponsoring all kind of interesting drinks and pizza on Sunday :)

Ten days ago, I spent a week-end in Berlin with a group of KDE friends to have a KDE-edu sprint. I didn’t blog about it yet because we planned to make a group post to summarize the event, but since it takes some time, I decided to write a quick personal report too.

The sprint was hosted in Endocode offices, which was a very nice place to work together.

Of course I came mostly because of GCompris, but the goal in the end was more to work together to try to redefine the goal and direction of KDE-edu and its website, and to work together on different tasks.

I added appstream links for all KDE-edu apps on their respective pages on KDE website. Those appstream links can be used to install directly applications from linux appstores supporting this standard.
On a side note, we thought it is a bit weird to be redirected from the KDE-edu website to KDE.org when looking at application info. This is one of the things that would need some refactoring. Actually, we discussed a lot about the evolution needed for the website. I guess all the details about this discussion will be on the group-post report, but to give you an idea, I would summarize it as : let’s make KDE-edu about how KDE-applications can be used in educational context, rather than just a collection of specific apps. A lot of great ideas to work on!

For GCompris, I was very happy to can meet Rishabh, who did some work on the server part. I could test the branch with him, and discussed about what needs to be done. Next, I fixed and improved the screenshots available for our appdata info, and started to look at building a new package on Mac with Sanjiban.

I also cleaned an svg file of Ktuberling to help Albert who worked on buiding it for Android.

In the end, I would say it was a productive week-end. Many thanks to KDE e.V. for the travel support, and to Endocode for hosting the event and providing cool drinks.

Read all about it here:
https://blog.neon.kde.org/index.php/2017/10/17/kde-kdeneon-release-bonanaza-frameworks-plasma-kmymoney-and-digikam/

A couple of years ago, I made a blog post, KDE makes Qt, with data about which percentage of Qt contributions came from people starting in KDE. Basically, how many Qt contributions are made by people who used KDE as a “gateway” drug into it.

I have now updated the graphs with data until the end of September 2017:

Many of these changes are made by people not directly as a result of their KDE work, but as a result of their paid work. But this doesn’t change the fact that KDE is an important project for attracting contributors to Qt, and a very good place to find experienced Qt developers.

After many years of working on it, it is with immense pleasure to see the FLA-2.0 – the full rewrite of the Fiduciary License Agreement – officially launch.

What is the FLA?¶

In short, the FLA is a well-balanced contributor agreement, which gives the trustee responsible for managing the rights within a FOSS project, power and responsiblity to make sure the contributed software always remain free and open. This way the project, together with all the respective contributors, are protected against misuse of power by a new holder of exclusive rights.

If you are more of a audio-visual type, you can see my 15' intro at Akademy 2013 or my 5' intro at Akademy 2015 to understand the basics of the FLA. The talks are about FLA-1.2, but the basic gist of it is the same.

Reasons for update and changes¶

In the decade since the last update of the FLA (version 1.2, back in 2007), the world of IT has changed quite a bit and, apart from copyright, patents and trade marks have become a serious concern for FOSS projects.

For my LL.M. thesis I analysed the FLA-1.2 within its historic context and use in practice. The following topics that should be improved have been identified in the thesis:

• include patents;
• better compatibility with other jurisdictions (e.g. Belgium and India);
• more practical selection of outbound licensing options;
• usability and readability of the text itself.

Trade marks were also identified as an important issue, but not a topic a CA could fix. For that a project might want to look at the FOSSmarks website instead.

To implement the changes, there were two possibilities – either modernise the text of the FLA-1.x to meet modern needs or tweak a more modern CA to include all checks and balances of the FLA.

In the true spirit of FOSS, I decided to re-base the FLA-2.0 on the best researched CA I could find – the ContributorAgreements.org templates. Luckily, Catharina Maracke was not only merely OK with it, but very supportive as well. In fact, several of the changes that FLA brought with it trickled down into the new versions of (the rest of) the ContributorAgreements.org templates as well.

Changes inherited from ContributorAgreements.org¶

With simply re-basing the FLA-2.0 on the ContributorAgreements.org templates, we inherited some very cool features:

• improved compatibility with more jurisdictions – thanks to the academic research invested already into it;
• changed to an exclusive CLA (previously: a full-on copyright assignment, with an exclusive CLA as a fall-back) – which is both easier to manage as well as less scary to the contributors;
• added a patent license (based on Apache CLA) – so the project itself can be protected from a potential patent troll contributing to it.

Further changes to FLA-2.0¶

But we did not stop there! With the combined enthusiasm of both Catharina and yours truly, as well as ample support of a number of very smart people¹, we pushed onward and introduced fixes and new features both for the FLA and the ContributorAgreements.org.

Below is a list only the biggest ones:

• improved both the legibility of the wording and the usability of the CA chooser;
• compatibility with even more jurisdictions – we improved the wording even further, so it should work as expected also in countries like India and Belgium;
• narrower list of allowed outbound licenses – i.e. intersection between Free Software and Open Source licenses (instead of Free Software OR Open Source licenses as is more common);
• introduced more outbound licensing options:
  • any FOSS license;
  • specific FOSS license(s);
  • separate (re)licensing policy – this is particularly useful for larger and longer-standing projects such as KDE, who have (to have) their own (re)licensing policies in place.

Future plans¶

While the 2.0 is a huge leap forward, we do not plan to leave it at rest. We are already gathering ideas for a 2.1 update, which we plan to launch much faster than in a decade. Of course, the changes in the minor update will not be as huge either, but more fine-tuning. Still, for a legal document such as a license it is in general not a good idea to release soon and release often, so if you are in need of a well-balanced CLA, the FLA-2.0 is here and ready to be used.

hook out → blog is back online, and I’m in Prague for OSSEU. Woot²! \o/

This week the annual LibreOffice conference was held in Rome and I had the pleasure to attend. The city of Rome is migrating their IT infrastructure to open software and standards and the city council was kind enough to provide the awesome venue for the event, the Campidoglio.

Photo by Simon Phipps

It is always interesting to meet new people from other communities that share the same values we have in KDE. You meet new friends and you get to know another perspective about the things you are doing.

As a bonus point, I also had the pleasure to meet in person with KDE contributors Andreas Kainz, Franklin Weng, Heiko Tzietze and Jos van den Oever. See you all at Akademy next year!

LibreOffice in Plasma 5

Among the speakers, Katarina Behrens from CIB talked about the status of the Qt5 port of the VCL plugin for KDE Plasma. VCL is the toolkit used by LibreOffice to draw the UI of the program, and its plugin-based architecture allows to adapt the UI to the various native toolkits (such as Qt or GTK).

The KDE plugin is currently stuck with Qt4/kdelibs4 and Katarina has been working on porting it to the new Qt5/KF5 stack. The city of Munich is also sponsoring this work, since they will continue to use LibreOffice for at least some years. The main challenge has been getting rid of the legacy X11 code used for drawing the UI. As a result of this task, the new version of the KDE plugin will get proper Wayland and Hi-DPI support.

If you are wondering if this will bring the native Plasma 5 file picker in LibreOffice, the answer is yes! If any developer wants to help reach this milestone, feel free to contact Katarina who will introduce you to what still needs to be done (a lot).

LibreOffice Online

Lastly, I talked with the Collabora people about the issues that KDE faced with LibreOffice Online in our Nextcloud instance. They assured me that the product has been greatly improved with respect to collaborative editing. By the number of talks and speakers about this topic, it is clear that they have been working hard on it.

Our instance was also using a slightly old version of Collabora Online (2.0.7), so they recommended to upgrade to the 2.1.x series (which Ben quickly did). I think that we as community should give another try to LibreOffice Online and report back to the Collabora developers if we still find issues with the tool. As always, that’s the best way to improve FLOSS!

More photos of the event are available in this album.

The second minor release of the 17.08 series is out adding a rotate from image center option in the Transform effect among other usability improvements. In other news the dev team continues making progress for the much anticipated 17.12 release. Start the countdown!

Bugfixes

• Fix autosave: work around KAutoSaveFile bug with non-ASCII chars. Commit.
• Get ready for transform centered rotation. Commit.
• Fix keyframes unseekable on bin effects. Commit.
• Fix lift to handle negative values (requires latest MLT version). Commit.
• Prefer SDL2 to SDL1 (dropped by FFmpeg and so MLT). Commit.

Two weeks, two posts. Lets see how long I can keep up with this!

Last weekend I was part of the KDE Edu Sprint 2017 in the Endocode offices in Berlin, just a couple of days before the Qt World Summit, which was actually my first KDE Edu sprint (if you do not count Randa 2014). It was great as always to meet other KDE developers working on educational projects and I think we got a lot of work done.

While my primary focus going into the sprint was to work on macro support in Kig (there were many open bugs regarding macros), Aleix Pol's initial remarks helped me realize it was better to "take advantage of the fact that we were all at one place, and work on things you cannot do back home" so I decided to see what others were doing and try to help with that as well. Since Sandro Andrade was working on testing KDE Edu builds in Windows using Craft and I had been working on generating Craft recipes from Portage ebuilds, I finished a script that translates portage ebuilds from Gentoo's Portage tree into Craft recipes. This will automate low-hanging fruits like applications that basically only depend on KDE frameworks and Qt5 libraries. I committed this script to the development scripts repository in case someone finds them useful. It is a very experimental script so you are welcome to improve it!

In the meantime, while we waited for these Windows builds to happen, I did get a lot of work done on macro support in Kig. I implemented a feature that allows for creating macros without given objects and while at it, fixed several other issues regarding macros. Some of the changes are still being reviewed, but they all should land before Applications 17.12.

Since I obviously have no picture about my trip (I am terrible at taking pictures), I will shamelessly steal this one from Aleix's twitter post:

I want to thank the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my trip to this sprint, and Endocode for hosting us and giving us essential coffee for free. Also, big thanks to Free Software Foundation Europe for allowing me to visit their offices in the middle of a Monday while they were working hard to maintain software freedom in Europe.

A while ago I started to use Kate's code as a base on Atelier. Since Kate uses KTextEditor API, and I need to use it, it was quite handy for me. With that in mind, I noted that all the Signals&Slots of Kate was on the following deprecated pattern of Qt4. With that kind of [...]

Date: Friday, 3 November 2017
Time: 19:00
Place: Bier Brezel (sic), Hauptstraße 184, 69117 Heidelberg
Who: You! And fellow KDE developers and users
What we’re going to do: Have a few beers, a delicious dinner, talk, have fun, …

Please ping me, if you’re around and planning to come (contact info can be found in the Impressum, or tell kbroulik in #plasma on Freenode), so I can extend the reservation, if needed.

Cutelyst the Qt web framework got a new release. This is a rather small release but has some important fixes so I decided to roll sooner.

The dispatcher logic got 30% faster, parsing URL encoded data is also a bit faster on some cases (using less memory), Context objects can now be instantiated by library users to allow for example getting notifications from SQL databases and be able to forward to Cutelyst actions or Views, pkg-config support has also improved a bit but still misses most modules.

Have fun https://github.com/cutelyst/cutelyst/archive/v1.9.0.tar.gz

Elisa is a music player designed to be simple and nice to use.

I have started again to work on Windows build of the application and a recipe to build Elisa is now integrated in the craft-blueprints-kde repository. It is already quite usable thanks to the portability offered by Qt and KF5 Frameworks and the quality of Craft meta build system.

Snapshot of Elisa on Windows 7

Apart from that, I have integrated the following things:

• Fix a bug blocking the play when under some conditions asking to enqueue some music and playing immediately would not work ;
• Fix the display of tracks count in the playlist ;
• Improve the handling of Elisa application icon such that it is bundled in the executable ;
• Continue to improve focus handling especially with touch screens ;
• Add mouse hover effect in the list of view modes (all albums, all artists …).

I am currently working on improvements of error handling when playing music. I also plan to explore using Phonon to have a possibly easier out of the box experience for flatpak and Windows when using the vlc backend. I am getting frustrated by getting missing codec errors from QtMultimedia.

Edit: I added a screenshot of Elisa on Windows 7 as requested.

So, to continue my archeology process to revive old software, again i´m preparing my next step to revive KDE 2, on the so indirect baptized KDE restoration project.

Despite KDE 1 last year, KDE 2 is a complete different beast and will take me some time to made it ready.

The very base foundation, though is Qt2, the this time i decided do a better treatment to Qt to easier my further work. I based my work on clang compiler.

Result is far from perfect, i decided publish on the very first stage of usage, but some strategies on the port still not here yet. but is perfectly usable, all examples compiles and runs.

Qt designer has some funny bugs though, and i decided not investigate it yet. New ported png code is not 100% reliable ( png pure documentation is horrible )

So, the F.A.Q. for the curious

• Why ????
  • Because i was motivated and i really believe we need to restore our memory code wise.
• Don’t you have better things to do ?
  • Yes, so what ?
• Can i compile on Windows ?
  • Well, yes but not yet. I focused only on *nix platforms for now, mostly Linux
• Can i use with Wayland ?
  • Nope, an i doubt about future.
• Can i compile applications with Qt2
  • Yes, perfect plausible
• Do you accept patches ?
  • It depends. If is for fix or improve the buildsystem or fix a bug on code, yes. Otherwise i want to keep the code as most as original possible. Remember, the intention is archeological. And i will be happy if anyone tackle the crazy designer ( or themes example ) before me
• Are you joking with us ?
  • Nope. The code for now is in: https://github.com/heliocastro/qt2

The mandatory screenshot !!

Librem 5 Plasma Mobile

1. Unique Privacy Features: Kill-switches and auditable code

Neither Apple nor Android have convincing stories when it comes to privacy. Ultimately, they’re both under the thumbs of a restrictive government, which, to put it mildly doesn’t give a shit about privacy and has created the most intrusive global spying system in the history of mankind. Thanks to the U.S., we now live in the dystopian future of Orwell’s 1984. It’s time to put an end to this with hardware kill switches that cut off power to the radio, microphone and camera, so phones can’t be hacked into anymore to listen in on your conversations, take photos you never know were taken and send them to people you definitely would never voluntarily share them with. All that comes with auditable code, which is something that we as citizens should demand from our government. With a product on the market supplying these features, it becomes very hard for your government to argue that they really need their staff to use iphones or Android devices. We can and we should demand this level of privacy from those who govern us and handle with our data. It’s a matter of trust.
Companies will find this out first, since they’re driven by the same challenges but usually much quicker to adopt technology.

2. Hackable software means choice

The librem 5 will run a mostly standard Debian system with a kernel that you can actually upgrade. The system will be fully hackable, so it will be easy for others to create modified phone systems based on the librem. This is so far unparalleled and brings the freedom the Free software world has long waited for, it will enable friendly competition and collaboration. All this leads to choice for the users.

3. Support promise

Can a small company such as Purism actually guarantee support for a whole mobile software stack for years into the future? Perhaps. The point is, even in case they fail (and I don’t see why they would!), the device isn’t unsupported. With the librem, you’re not locked into a single vendor’s eco system, but you buy into the support from the whole Free software community. This means that there is a very credible support story, as device doesn’t have to come from a single vendor, and the workload is relatively limited in the first place. Debian (which is the base for PureOS) will be maintained anyway, and so will Plasma as tens of millions of users already rely on it. The relatively small part of the code that is unique to Plasma Mobile (and thus isn’t used on the desktop) is not that hard to maintain, so support is manageable, even for a small team of developers. (And if you’re not happy with it, and think it can be done better, you can even take part.)

4. It builds and enables a new ecosystem

The Free software community has long waited for this hackable device. Many developers just love to see a platform they can build software for that follows their goals, that allows development with a proven stack. Moreover, convergence allows users to blur the lines between their devices, and advancing that goal hasn’t been on the agenda with the current duopoly.
The librem 5 will put Matrix on the map as a serious contender for communication. Matrix has rallied quite a bit of momentum to bring more modern mobile-friendly communication, chat and voice to the Free software eco-system.
Overall, I expect the librem 5 to make Free software (not just open-source-licensed, but openly developed Free software) a serious player also on mobile devices. The Free software world needs such a device, and now is the time to create it. With this huge success comes the next big challenge, actually creating the device and software.

The unique selling points of the librem 5 definitely strike a chord with a number of target groups. If you’re doubtful that its first version can fully replace your current smart phone, that may be justified, but don’t forget that there’s a large number of people and organisations that can live with a more limited feature set just fine, given the huge advantages that private communication and knowing-what’s-going-on in your device brings with it.
The librem 5 really brings something very compelling to the table and those are the reasons why it got funded. It is going to be a viable alternative to Android and iOS devices that allows users to enjoy their digital life privately. To switch off tracking, and to sleep comfortably.
Are you convinced this is a good idea? Don’t hesitate to support the campaign and help us reach its stretch goals!