Pine company idea

[aular]

I was reading the website on some stuff and i know that Pine64 as a company is community driven for software development. That gave me an idea so i hope i might be able to help even if they have already thought about it. 

If Pine64 as a company is relient on the community to develop software, and we know that some stuff does need a software update to get stuff to work, i dont know if it has any advantages but could they create a go fund me to get the money needed to hire the people to get the software to where it can be at...like battery, I read somewhere that the battery has a much needed update to get it to work for as long as possible and somebody said somewhere that some other company created a codebase to be able to get a good working battery but since Pine dont have access to that codebase and they rely on the community to develop the code for the battery, thats where the go fund me would be handy.

Just and idea, thanks

[KC9UDX]

I don't think you need to wait for the company to do this. It seems to me that you (or anyone else in this community) could do it.

Pine64 is already doing what Pine64 does best.

[Kevin Kofler]

Also, the battery has no software that you could code. (There is probably some hardcoded firmware in a ROM in it, there is hardly anything without firmware these days, but that is not something you can, or even want to, modify.) When we speak about coding to improve battery usage, we do not mean to code anything in the battery itself, but to optimize all the code running on the CPU for lower battery use. That is long, tedious work (e.g., Android jumps through big hoops to save power, forcing apps to save their state and shut down and replacing them with a screenshot in the UI to give the user the illusion that they are still running), and there is obviously a physical limit to how far you can optimize power consumption. (The SoC in the PinePhone simply consumes more power than the ones in most Android phones, and the SoC in the PinePhone Pro even more.) So this is not just a matter of "updating the battery". (The only kind of "update" that could help there would be an updated physical battery design with more capacity, nothing you can do in software. You might even be able to find higher-capacity third-party batteries that fit, but the wiki now explicitly warns about those because at least some of them can deliver too much power at once or accept too much charging power at once, frying other components in the phone. And personally, all the compatible third-party batteries I was able to find had exactly the same capacity as the Pine64 one anyway.)

[aular]

I was using the battery as an example for the overall bigger picture.

[diederik]

Anyone can hire a developer; that's not something the Pine64 company needs to do.

IMO there are 2 main problems

1. finding a person who (even) has the skills to build the driver you need
   
2. getting the money to pay such a person as they won't be cheap
   

ad 2) Say they cost $200 an hour and it would take a month to build that driver. Assuming 8 hours a day and 22 days a month, we're talking $35k.
If they cost $400 an hour, we're talking about $70k.

And that's for 1 driver.

I think the community is great, but I don't see them pony up the amount of money you'd need to pay someone professionally.
While the numbers I used are fictitious, I can guarantee you they would cost a LOT per hour.
And that's because 1) is hard. And there's a huge demand for people with those skills.

Or you find someone who would do it for ideological reasons. And then the problem is not likely to be monetary, but finding someone for 1) with enough free time to do it.

[KC9UDX]

@diederik very true.

But, a one-time bounty is very likely to give better results than someone on a payroll. And, probably cost ⅓ or less.

[diederik]

I can be wrong ofc, but I haven't seen a case where a bounty made a difference wrt kernel driver development which is a highly skilled and highly specialized area of development. In that case it's either "doing it for fun" (and/or ideological reasons) and not get paid at all or someone gets payed to do it as part of their job.

I think that bounties can work well for tasks which are not overly complex and you have a large pool of people who could do it.

I'd love to be proven wrong though  
But don't expect Pine 'Inc' to set up a bounty/go-fund-me page as they'll likely only get backslash/complaints along the line "why aren't YOU paying for it".

[KC9UDX]

We all end up doing most of this stuff for fun/masochism/insomnia. But a bounty might cause someone like me who wouldn't make time to have second thoughts. (Not that I personally would, because I'm not a C/python/rust programmer; else it really is something I'd tackle if it was worth my while. Low-level drivers are right up my alley, but not for this software.) A steady paycheck might not make me ambitious enough to give the desired results on time. Not for a one-off.

I would hope Pine64 wouldn't get so involved. But if the OP wanted to dangle others' money out there: so if he could wrangle it up, a refundable bounty for a working solution is worth a shot, methinks. The right guy could be persuaded to do it for fun *and* money.

[aular]

I wasnt trying to dangle others money out there but sometimes this would be for the greater good for all the distros, which if we finally have a good working batter life that can go as long as a mid range android or even a iphone 5 from 10 years ago that might spurn other people to start developing for the linux world and get people to use something more then android or iphone.

Hey i look at the iphone mini as having the same capasity battery as the pinephone and the mini(heck even the iphone 5) can go all day on a single charge. Im not going to say the pinephone can go that far as the mini but if we can squeeze its full capasity out of it, it should be able to do at least the iphone 5 or close to it. just saying

Sometimes a monitary insentive for the greater good might be a kick in the butt to get linux somewhere where it can be a actuall threat to android and iphone.

[KC9UDX]

It was supposed to say "if" you did. (I fixed it)