Re: [Arm-netbook] The Unplanned Obsolescence of the First Fairphone Device « Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog
Joining the discussion late and breaking the threading... ;-)
Nico Rikken wrote:
Having had recent contact with the Fairphone-team on this issue (as a potential customer), they state that above all they are interested in working with the community to get this sorted. Now that they have a dedicated Software Developer in Kees Jongenburger hopefully they'll be able to turn things around for future models. We know the difficulties, but they clearly underestimated the impact of their hardware decision.
I must admit that I felt a bit bad complaining about their software strategy when there is someone who does seem to care about the matter (at least now, anyway). But I still feel that the initiative managed to store up a lot of problems that they could easily have avoided.
As I noted a year-and-a-half ago [1], the publicity materials seemed to play fast and loose with things like software sustainability and platform openness: mocking up Skype running on a phone (or perhaps just taking a screenshot from an existing phone) might work for much-needed stock images, but it sends the wrong message on a number of issues (Skype being proprietary software, uses a proprietary network, has various intelligence agencies and corporations eavesdropping on conversations, is controlled by a single corporation who happens to have a competing software platform and is shaking down Android product vendors for patent licences).
Of course, a lot of the potential audience don't care about that: they just want to be reassured that the materials in the phone are ethically sourced before reaching for their usual toys, and they hadn't then (and probably haven't now) widened their ethical concerns in the areas of privacy and transparency. My impression is that those running the initiative either didn't have such widened concerns, didn't want to tackle such things as well as the other stuff, or just got some bad advice.
The sad thing is that good advice could have been had for a tiny fraction of the effort that these people have gone to in the areas of materials sourcing and fair working practices, which as far as I can tell, have been thoroughly dealt with and require a commitment to social justice that involves dealing with some fairly entrenched and, particularly in the case of the minerals supply chain, some rather horrible problems.
I have to note that I wouldn't have been so aware of the dubious practices of the hardware business myself if it hadn't been for Luke and others documenting it on this list and elsewhere, or of the mishaps that plagued the first attempt at the Vivaldi tablet, but those lessons have been out there for people to learn from, and it seems now that either those responsible for the groundwork just didn't have the community awareness or that they felt that things would mend themselves when selecting manufacturing partners: itself a compromise between the flexibility to get the software done the right way (potentially treading on toes and "offending" existing suppliers), and the flexibility to change their other practices to make the manufacturing workplace generally fairer.
But then again, running a choice of a MediaTek product by just a few knowledgeable people would have been enough to set the alarm bells ringing. Maybe Fairphone would have made the same decision, anyway, and as the notorious Stephen Elop speech [2] noted (dredged up recently in another blog post of mine [3]), cobbling together MediaTek designs and throwing them over the wall was (and undoubtedly still is [4]) common practice, to the point that doing something else might have been a struggle.
But as we all know, you have to make and sustain investments to do the right thing. If you look for short-term fixes, you get short-term solutions, and that's what some of Fairphone's customers will be experiencing in the coming months and years. Again, Fairphone have committed themselves to ongoing investments in other areas, and it's a shame that they didn't consider the technological realm worthy of the same consideration.
Paul
P.S. I just realised that this could have been another complete article. Sorry to make it a long message for this list! :-)
P.P.S. For those who haven't read it yet, Bunnie's MediaTek reverse- engineering article [4] below is long but interesting reading. You've got to admire Bunnie's determination!
[1] http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=168 [2] http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops- in-brutally-honest-burnin/ [3] http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=835 [4] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 5:54 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
Joining the discussion late and breaking the threading... ;-)
join the looong club, it's not entirely um without precedent here ...
P.S. I just realised that this could have been another complete article. Sorry to make it a long message for this list! :-)
we liike long messages :)
P.P.S. For those who haven't read it yet, Bunnie's MediaTek reverse- engineering article [4] below is long but interesting reading. You've got to admire Bunnie's determination!
yehhhh, been there - at some point you just have to take a step back and ask yourself, "is this *really* worth it? what could i better achieve - what goal could i set - that has a higher bang-per-buck ratio for my effort-to-result" and you start to advocate the same things as libv, such as "for goodness sake stay away from powervr".
no the problem with mediatek is that they are actually *really low cost*. price-wise they truly have the market.
and in the phone market, it is made even worse by the fact that FCC certification is *directly* incompatible with the goals of the FSF for these "hybrid" SoCs, where there is access to the GSM/3G/LTE radio from the memory of the main SoC. remember: each variant of the firmware-hardware combination requires re-certification. that's $USD 50,000 *each time you upgrade the OS!*.
back in 2004 someone reverse-engineered one of the low-cost HTC smartphones which has a hybrid SoC with its GSM/3G baseband sharing the same memory as the SoC. it was discovered that you could change the power output of the GSM Transmitter simply by changing the contents of a memory address. from WinCE! it wasn't even protected, so even a standard WinCE application or virus could do it! and that's just damn dangerous.... *but* it's low-cost.
so for FSF Endorsebility you need to have a *separate* 3G/GSM/LTE chipset - entirely separate - which means it now needs USB2 connectivity (to the main SoC), but the firmware is complex these days (AT command set for a start) so you need a general-purpose SoC *in the Radio Chipset*, and you also need quite a bit of RAM (separate RAM ICs), *and* you need NAND/NOR Flash to store the firmware: all that means extra cost.
so you now have an additional $USD 12 for a GSM/EDGE phone and an additional $USD 30 or so for a 3G one in the BOM if you want to go the properly ethical upgradeable route, because you can, if you do that, use any general-purpose SoC available on the market: allwinner, TI, Freescale - anything.
l.
[1] http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=168 [2] http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops- in-brutally-honest-burnin/ [3] http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=835 [4] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
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thx paul boddie. I find your articles most helpful to me, broadening my view, examples of how to write, explaining things really well - gives me something to link too that explains thinks i've been thinking on or havn't been thinking about but you hit the nail on the head and write up clearly.
I think "fair"phone deserve a slap,nuge,etc. I've been most frustrated with them and completely disappointed in them. while I thank them for making the sources of the minerals not (so?) evil. there thinking,policy about software has been bs :(. it still status quo of a new hole product each year or 2 to replace what could be a perfectly good working one if it wasn't for the software. it's like there just another group vs group and with this group there aim so to keep miners employed at all costs. while claiming the better morals :(
so thats why i will never get a unfair-to-me-phone.
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 1:00 AM, Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross maillist_arm-netbook@aross.me wrote:
I think "fair"phone deserve a slap,nuge,etc. I've been most frustrated with them and completely disappointed in them. while I thank them for making the sources of the minerals not (so?) evil. there thinking,policy about software has been bs :(. it still status quo of a new hole product each year or 2 to replace what could be a perfectly good working one if it wasn't for the software.
and that lack of upgradeability, being precisely what makes it obsolete and thus a *burden* on the environment rather than a gain, is *exactly* why they are happy to listen, now.
they didn't think this through properly because it really is more complex than they suspected.
l.
On Monday 12. January 2015 02.00.29 Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross wrote:
thx paul boddie. I find your articles most helpful to me, broadening my view, examples of how to write, explaining things really well - gives me something to link too that explains thinks i've been thinking on or havn't been thinking about but you hit the nail on the head and write up clearly.
That's very kind of you! I think I'm probably too verbose - I even got told this once by a former colleague and he was talking about me when I'm talking, never mind when I'm writing stuff down - and thus there's always scope for some editing.
One of my more useful recent experiences involved editing myself down to meet a submission limit, and that really forced me to focus on the most important parts of the message, even though I thought there were some nice things that had to be dropped. It was also in another language, and so it was also a useful exercise in being concise and still coherent, which I hope I managed.
Editing stuff can be infuriating because it means spending even more time on something that you want to just write, publish and be done with, so I guess I'm not really much of a blogger. ;-)
I think "fair"phone deserve a slap,nuge,etc. I've been most frustrated with them and completely disappointed in them. while I thank them for making the sources of the minerals not (so?) evil. there thinking,policy about software has been bs :(. it still status quo of a new hole product each year or 2 to replace what could be a perfectly good working one if it wasn't for the software. it's like there just another group vs group and with this group there aim so to keep miners employed at all costs. while claiming the better morals :(
I don't think the miners really want to keep doing their jobs if they could be doing something nicer, but that leads to the problem of economic development in those countries. And that's not a developed versus developing world issue: mining was big in places like the UK for a long time, but you have to ask whether sufficient opportunities were created when those industries were run down a few decades ago. Still, I'm going a bit off-topic here and will exercise restraint to keep the message short. ;-)
so thats why i will never get a unfair-to-me-phone.
One thing Fairphone has arguably managed to achieve is a very public focus on sourcing, as we saw recently with accusations (the Panorama programme on the BBC, I think) about Apple's tin sourcing from Indonesia, with the apparent need for a response by Apple's CEO and assertions (like we've seen around fair employment) that Apple is supposedly improving the situation.
But on matters of privacy, ownership of devices, and competition issues, the situation is as dire as it was for the personal computer industry, if not worse. Here, it's no longer sufficient to deliver an unfair device that's produced in a relatively fair way, and then to claim that it is "fair".
Paul
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