Martijn Braam, one of the key developers of the postmarketOS distribution, announced his departure from the Pine64 open source community, due to the project's focus on one specific distribution rather than supporting an ecosystem of different distributions working together on a software stack.
Initially, Pine64 used the strategy of delegating the development of software for its devices to the community of Linux distribution developers and created Community editions of the PinePhone smartphone, supplied with different distributions. Last year, the decision was made to use the default Manjaro distribution and stop creating separate editions of PinePhone Community Edition in favor of developing PinePhone as a holistic platform that offers a basic reference environment by default.
According to Martin, this change in development strategy upset the balance in the PinePhone software development community. 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 rollout on 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 maintaining existing packages and using already created developments for its own assembly, without making a noticeable contribution to the development of a common software stack that could be useful for other distributions. Manjaro has also been criticized for incorporating changes in development into builds that are not yet considered ready to be brought to users by the main projects.
By becoming the primary build of PinePhone, Manjaro not only remained the only distribution receiving financial support from the Pine64 project, but also began to have a disproportionate influence on the development of Pine64 products and decision-making in the associated ecosystem. In particular, technical decisions in Pine64 are now often made only based on the needs of Manjaro, without properly taking into account 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 bootloader, necessary for equal support for different distributions and avoiding binding to Manjaro u-Boot.
In addition, focusing on one build reduced the motivation to develop a common platform and created a feeling of injustice among the rest of the participants, since distributions receive donations from the Pine64 project, in the amount of $10 from the sale of each revision of the PinePhone smartphone that comes with this distribution. Now, Manjaro receives all the royalties from sales, despite its mediocre contribution to the development of a common platform.
Martin believes that this practice undermined the existing mutually beneficial cooperation in the community associated with the development of software for Pine64 devices. It is noted that now in the Pine64 community there is no longer the former cooperation between distributions and only a small number of third-party developers working on important components of the software stack remain active. As a result, development activity for software stacks for new devices such as the PinePhone Pro and PineNote has now virtually ceased, which could be fatal to the development model used by the Pine64 project, which relies on the community to develop software.
Source: opennet.ru