Why I left PINE64 (UPDATED)
With community members influence in PINE64 diminished in favor of a Manjaro mono-culture, what was once a vibrant ecosystem has been reduced to a bunch of burnt-out and maligned developers abandoning the project. The development channels are no longer the great collaboration between various distributions developing PinePhone components and there are now only a small number of unpaid developers working on anything important. Many of PINE64's new devices, such as the PinePhone Pro, PineNote, and others, have few to no developers working on the software — a potential death blow for PINE64's model of relying on the community to build the software.
Update
A couple of responses to this.
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A response to Martijn’s blog | PINE64
We rarely, if ever, make responses to blog posts or articles. In fact, there is only one instance that I can think of when we did so. So then, somewhat uncharacteristically, this is a response post to Martijn Braam’s blog in which he explains why he left the PINE64 community. Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Martijn has done a lot for mobile Linux and PINE64 – he is a valued contributor and a colleague with a good insight into how PINE64 and the Pine Store Ltd operate. I should add that his opinions are welcome just as they have always been. Finally, there is no denying that his leaving is a significant loss to the project and, on a private level, a sad state of affairs for us in the community. If it wasn’t clear, we really like Martijn. But this isn’t what this blog post is about. Instead, this is a response to the points and concerns Martijn raises.
A short summary first: Martijn’s blog entry alleges that following PinePhone community editions, and after settling on Manjaro with KDE’s plasma mobile as the default OS, PINE64 and the Pine Store Ltd have sidelined developers from other mobile Linux projects. The argument is made that this has hurt development. The example given in the blog post supposes that the community team and Pine Store employees were firmly intent on removing SPI on the PinePhone Pro and coerced not to ship Tow-Boot. He concludes by saying that we no longer listen to the development community.
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PINE64 has let its community down
I know that apologising and taking responsibility for your mistakes is difficult. It seems especially difficult for commercial endeavours, which have fostered a culture of cold disassociation from responsibility for their actions, where admitting to wrongdoing is absolutely off the table. I disagree with this culture, but I understand where it comes from, and I can empathise with those who find themselves in the position of having to reconsider their actions in the light of the harm they have done. It’s not easy.
But, the reckoning must come. I have been a long-time supporter of PINE64. On this blog I have written positively about the PinePhone and PineBook Pro. I believed that PINE64 was doing the right thing and was offering something truly revolutionary on the path towards getting real FOSS systems into phones. I use a PinePhone as my daily driver,2 and I also own a PineBook Pro, two RockPro64s, a PinePhone Pro, and a PineNote as well. All of these devices have issues, some of them crippling, but PINE64’s community model convinced me to buy these with confidence in the knowledge that they would be able to work with the community to address these flaws given time.