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Oh ffs, why do I even look into these things? I think I’m being harsh and then it’s always worse than I thought:
FairPhone has taken venture capital.
https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Crowd-Notification.pdf
They’ve been invested in by, among others, Invest-NL (currently three exits, all IPOs¹) and Quadia (also three exits, all acquisitions²).
I would just like it if for once – fucking once – it wasn’t just about making money.
*sigh*
¹ https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/invest-nl/recent_investments
² https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/quadia/recent_investments
@aral the IBM PC may provide a model for how to do it with VC and without greed.
Create an open specification for a cell phone that uses commodity components and can be assembled by hand. V1 might be the size of a book but it would be a start.
Might be impossible given some of the complexity in cell phones, so maybe a WiFi only tablet is a better way to begin.
@Codhisattva Oh I don’t think IBM is anyone’s role model. I mean, putting the small matter of helping Hitler carry out the Holocaust aside (oops), we’re talking about a corporation that worked with Duterte and wrote a fawning open love letter to Donald Trump when he got elected.
@aral sure I understand all that. What I am referencing is the 12 person team that gave the world a specification that lead to the PC revolution in the 70s. The PC specification was public domain and defined the standard that would dominate computing for decades.
@Codhisattva Yeah, but they didn’t even do that from the goodness of their hearts. They just wanted to unseat Apple who had beaten them to the punch (and they succeeded; at least for a while). Google used the same strategy with Android. And, once it was successful started doing what these companies do: started closing off Android by moving new feature development into the proprietary Google Play Services.
I guess my point is we need fundamental change in funding, success criteria & structures.