PINE64 drama as moderator quits

Publicly calls out PinePhone manufacturer’s failings.

We’ve often talked about PINE64’s projects, including the PinePhone and PineBook. The company caught our eye by producing devices with an admirable commitment to both open source software and hardware, and with the PinePhone brought us a Linux-powered smartphone when other projects, such as Ubuntu Touch, failed.

However, there’s been a bit of ugly drama, with Martijn Braam, a moderator for PINE64, publicly quitting and writing a lengthy blog post (https://bit.ly/lxf294pine64quit) about why. It’s not easy working for the PINE64 team, with Braam citing the decision by PINE64 to switch from supporting a range of distros, to focusing on Manjaro. The last straw for him was a change to how the PinePhone Pro boots, which forces Manjaro to boot from eMMC storage, rather than enabling users to choose and boot a distro from a microSD card.

While Braam states that “after months of discussions between the community, Manjaro, and PINE64 leadership, we finally were able to convince them to ship the PinePhone Pro with an SPI flash chip with Tow-Boot installed on it,” allowing other distros to boot without having to rely on U-Boot firmware, he was dismayed to find that the Pinebook Pro would ship with a similar boot constraining boot configurations, and no Tow-Boot included.

Braam claims PINE64 is neglecting its users in a bid to curry favour with Manjaro. This has caused PINE64 to issue a defence (https://bit. ly/lxf294pine64response). Hopefully this drama doesn’t distract from the good things this project has achieved.