Is anyone following what Aral Balkan & co are doing at https://ind.ie ?

They're crowdfunding development of a phone but also software that doesn't involve using privately owned cloud services to share messages, data etc.

I saw Aral give a talk on 'Digital Feudalism' a year or so back and he's quite a charismatic presenter but the resources he has make Jolla look like a megacorp.

The software side so far is 'Pulse' which is what was once Syncthing, Waystone which is a place to meetup and Heartbeat, a peer-to-peer social network.

The hardware is a mockup just now with nothing expected before end of 2016.



The crowdfunding has just started and seems to be doing well.

https://ind.ie/be-the-hope/

Nothing there about the device OS, at least I could not find anything?
Seems they are concentrating on the social network side or something like that.

They've not announced what the OS is going to be yet. It would be nice if it was based on Mer of course.

That would be great, but I wouldn't be surprised if they took the Blackphone approach: "let's take a phone with closed source hardware (binary blobs for drivers), put Android (AOSP) on it, throw in some proprietary apps and call it safe" :-/

For latest news :

https://source.ind.ie/project/ind-ie/commits/master


https://twitter.com/aral/status/531032866264973312

We’ll be deploying at noon for a 1PM release. Thunderclap hits at 5PM.+@indie

Yesterday they released a fundraise and a roadmap plan.
They expect to release a private pre-alpha (for those who donated $100 or more) on December 10th.

Edit: by the time of this post, 49% of the $100,000 needed was funded.

57% now far more reasonable than ubuntu campain isnt it

but workforces can not compare

https://ind.ie/blog/focus/

{

So, going forward, we are focussing the efforts of our tiny team on just one platform: Apple’s. We are starting with Mac and our goal is to also support iOS in the near future.

}

Ok next one

They should've just said from the beginning that they were going to work in very small steps due to being with literally only a couple of people. It's really silly that they first make all this buzz that they'll do this and that and write an OS from scratch and release a phone and now backtrack to say "sorry, we're only going to make something nobody will use on a proprietary platform, maybe in 20 years we'll write the first lines of a kernel for indieOS". Aral seems to be a great guy, but I pity the fool(s) who believed that this could actually become reality anytime soon.

It's disappointing that they've gone from an OS all the way down to another social network app that almost nobody is asking for.

You'd think also that if Mac/iOS already is being acknowledged by Aral as being more privacy oriented than Android, they'd target Android first for their secure social network app. I can't see the logic in going up against iMessage.