PostmarketOS developer leaves Pine64 due to community issues

Recently Martin Braam, one of the key developers of the postmarketOS distribution and who has also participated in Pine64, announced his departure from the Pine64 community in a blog post.

Martin Braam points out that the reason of his departure is due to the fact that initially Pine64 grew as a project that 25 came to have up to 25 different projects working on PinePhone, an apparently prosperous community, but this did not last long, since the project made the decision to now focus on a particular distribution instead of supporting an ecosystem of different distributions working together in a software stack.

Initially, Pine64 used the strategy delegate the development of bloatware for your devices to community of Linux distribution developers and formed community editions of the PinePhone supplied with different distributions.

Last year, the decision was made to use the Manjaro distribution by default and stop creating separate PinePhone community editions in favor of PinePhone development based on providing a reference environment by default.

Linux hardware projects are made or broken by the support of their community. PINE64 has made some brilliant moves to build a mobile Linux community and has also made some big mistakes. This is my take on how PINE64 made PinePhone a hit and then broke it again through their treatment of the community.

According to Martijn, this change in development strategy upset the balance in the community of PinePhone software development. Previously, all its participants acted on an equal footing and, to the best of their ability, jointly developed a common software platform. For example, the Ubuntu Touch developers did a lot of work on the initial implementation of the new hardware, the Mobian project prepared the telephony stack, and postmarketOS took care of the camera stack.

Manjaro Linux has mostly closed in on itself and has been keeping existing packages and using existing developments for its own build, without making a significant contribution to developing a common software stack that might be useful to other distributions. Manjaro has also been criticized for incorporating development changes into builds that are not yet considered ready to be released to users by the parent projects.

With the major build status of PinePhone, Manjaro not only remains the only distribution receiving financial support from the Pine64 project, but has become disproportionately influential in Pine64 product development and decision-making in the associated ecosystem.

En particular, technical decisions at Pine64 are now often made with Manjaro's needs in mind, without properly considering the wants and needs of other distributions. For example, in Pinebook Pro, the Pine64 project ignored the needs of other distributions and abandoned the use of SPI Flash and the Tow-Boot universal bootloader, which are required for equivalent support for different distributions and decoupling of Manjaro u-Boot .

Also, focus on a build reduced the motivation to develop a common platform and created a feeling of injustice among the rest of the participants, since the distributions receive donations from the Pine64 project, in the amount of $10 for the sale of PinePhone that comes its edition. Now, Manjaro receives all royalties from sales, despite its mediocre contribution to the development of a common platform.

Martin believes that this practice undermined the mutually beneficial cooperation existing in the community associated with the development of software padding for Pine64 devices. It is noted that now in the Pine64 community the old cooperation between distributions no longer exists and only a small number of third-party developers are active, working on important components of the software stack.

As a result, development of software stacks for new devices like PinePhone Pro and PineNote has all but ceased, which may be fatal to the development model used in the Pine64 project, which relies on the community for bloatware development.

Finally, if you are interested in being able to know more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.


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  1.   Miguel Rodriguez said

    Bad on the part of Pine64… But it is understandable that they want to focus attention and development on one distribution, in order to deliver a utility product that can compete in the market at a low price, while developing a configuration standard for everything the hardware that allows to eliminate incompatibilities.