PSA: Do not buy FuriLabs phone! Ask for a refund if you have ordered one.
FuriLabs advertises their phone as "transparency, freedom, and full control". This phone runs a custom fork of Mobian GNU/Linux called FuriOS.
Recently in their Matrix/Telegram group chat I had to witness that a contributor asking for the source code of their custom version of Andromeda, so that they could upstream the changes, but this request was denied by FuriLabs team member Barry.
This team member made up bullshit excuses as "it would take too much time" and saying extremely dismissive statements like "you can complain about it, but that won't change anything." and he called the important act providing the source code "low priority community stuff" and that they are more focused on making "money money money" (literal quote) right now.
Needless to say refusing to share source code and actively putting roadblocks and arguing with community members who only want to contribute should not be "low priority community stuff".
Considering that it just turned out that the source code of their Andromeda fork is proprietary that also makes me wonder what other software shipped on their phone is going to be proprietary.
Anyway this contributor -rightfully not being happy with the answer- continued the conversation. Eventually this contributor asked for a refund on the phone and FuriLabs member Wayne immediately banned them from the group chat. (They did approve the refund request though)
At this point I jumped into the conversation calling this sort of behavior extremely toxic and that I also find it extremely important that all source code is available.
This resulted in another in Wayne replying to me dismissively as well, making up excuses such as "We already have 100 repositories publicly available, 1 more isn't going to help you".
To be clear, I'm not asking for unreasonable things they can't even provide, such as source code for things the wireless modems or whatever.
We are only asking for the source code of existing free software projects that they modified.
Andromeda is licensed Apache 2.0 so yes they are technically allowed to make a proprietary fork, but if you're going to needlessly make proprietary forks, you really shouldn't advertise your phone as respecting freedom on your website.
This is against the spirit of freedom and especially terrible considering that FuriLabs was also allowed to have a stand to sell their phones at FOSDEM earlier this year.
Team member Barry eventually unbanned the contributor in question, but said "for anyone not aligning with our mission, there is always the option to part ways", which obviously prompted me to ask what their mission really is and if providing a phone with freedom and transparency is part of that mission.
They refused to answer this very simple question, and instead opted to also gave me a refund on the phone...
What an absolute disgrace, I hope they won't be allowed to show up at FOSDEM next year.
Aral Balkan
SoapDog
SuperDicq
GrapheneOS
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