Martijn Braam, one of the key developers of the postmarketOS distribution, announced his departure from the Pine64 community, which focuses on creating open devices, due to the project's concentration on a single distribution instead of supporting an ecosystem of various distributions collaboratively working on the software stack.
Initially, Pine64 employed a strategy of delegating the development of software for its devices to the Linux distribution developer community and created Community editions of the PinePhone smartphone, shipped with different distributions. Last year, it was decided to use the Manjaro distribution by default and discontinue the formation of separate PinePhone Community Edition releases in favor of developing PinePhone as a cohesive platform, offering a standard reference environment by default.
Martijn believes that this change in development strategy disrupted the balance within the community of software developers for the PinePhone. Previously, all participants had equal standing and collaboratively advanced the common software platform to the best of their ability. For instance, the developers of Ubuntu Touch did significant work on the initial deployment on new hardware, the Mobian project prepared the telephony stack, and postmarketOS worked on the camera support stack.
Manjaro Linux has primarily focused on itself, maintaining existing packages and utilizing already established contributions for its own builds, without making significant contributions to the development of the common software stack that could benefit other distributions. Manjaro has also faced criticism for including in its builds changes that are still in development, which have not yet been deemed ready for release to users by the main projects.
After receiving the status of the primary assembly for the PinePhone, the Manjaro distribution not only remained the only distribution receiving financial support from the Pine64 project but also began to exert an disproportionately large influence on the development of Pine64 products and decision-making within the associated ecosystem. In particular, technical decisions at Pine64 are now often made solely with the needs of Manjaro in mind, without adequately considering the wishes and needs of other distributions. For example, in the Pinebook Pro device, the Pine64 project ignored the needs of other distributions and abandoned the use of SPI Flash and the universal Tow-Boot loader, which are necessary for equal support of different distributions and to avoid dependency on Manjaro u-Boot.
Additionally, the focus on a single assembly has reduced the motivation to develop the overall platform and created a sense of injustice among other participants, as distributions receive donations from the Pine64 project amounting to $10 from the sale of each edition of the PinePhone smartphone shipped with this distribution. Now, however, all proceeds from sales go to Manjaro, despite its mediocre contribution to the development of the overall platform.
Martin believes that such practices have undermined the established mutually beneficial cooperation in the community related to developing software for Pine64 devices. It has been noted that there is no longer the previous collaboration among distributions within the Pine64 community, and the activity is maintained only by a small number of third-party developers working on important components of the software stack. As a result, the development of software stacks for new devices, such as PinePhone Pro and PineNote, has practically ceased, which may become fatal for the development model used in the Pine64 project that relies on the community for software development.
Source: opennet.ru
