Hello! Long time, no post.
As you may have heard, Endless joined the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board last week. We appreciate all the kind words of welcome we have received and are looking forward to strengthening our ties with this community. This has been a coming for a bit, and I’m looking forward for us to contribute more over the coming year!
On a personal note, this is really exciting to me. It’s been a couple years since I’ve had the pleasure of being on the Advisory Board, and I’m looking forward to working with the Board again. I’ve wanted to bring the two organizations closer for a while, and we got a glimpse of what was possible at the Design Hackfest in Rio last month.
Who we are and what we do:
Quite simply, we are trying to empower the world! Our mission is to make computing universally accessible, and to solve the barriers of cost and connectivity to the entire world. It’s a bold and ambitious goal, but we are absolutely serious about accomplishing this. There are billions of people who don’t have access to a computer, and would love to have one.
What’s that mean in practical terms? It means we are making a great computer that works at as low a price as we can make. It means constantly keeping an eye on cost while still providing a great value and experience to our users. It means that we want to provide a great OS and fantastic desktop to our users.
And it means that we have to think about a lot of things that many of us don’t think of: Things like connectivity, cost, and robustness are paramount in that environment, and that drives everything we do.
Endless is Hiring!
We can’t do this alone. We are looking for some great engineers to join our team. If this mission sounds great and you’re interested in working with us, let us know! We are looking for people who are passionate about bringing a great desktop to the rest of the world while developing some high-quality Free Software. We have a number of openings available:
- Application Software Developer: Part of providing a great computer experience is to provide offline applications and content to users.
- Cloud / Distributed Systems Architect: Help build the service that powers our offline content.
- Kernel Engineer: We want to run on as many different types of cheap devices as possible. This job will help bring us to laptops, desktops, and all sorts of crazy ARM devices.
- Internal Tooling Developer: We need someone to help maintain and build our internal build tools and create some new ones.
- Software Engineer: Don’t see the job you’re looking for? We’re always looking for fantastic engineers of all types!
Feel free to mail me or ping me on IRC if you have any questions!
The link that leads to mail.google.com in the first paragraph is broken.
From what I last understood, based on information available around the time of the Kickstarter, the desktop software that Endless develops will be closed source.
Even from a purely pragmatic standpoint (compared to an ideological one), the idea that there’s some benefit in keeping the source closed, let alone something that outweighs what you’re giving up by not going open source, seems a little weird to me. What I’m saying is that even if you say, “ideals be damned; we need to take the actions that are going to lead to our success”, the choice here doesn’t even seem to make *business* sense.
Imagine you’re chatting with someone you just met and hear that they’re working at a startup and they say they’re pretty sure they’ve got a really good strategy involving this proprietary software they’re developing. You ask them, “Oh yeah? What sort of software?” and they say, “a web browser”. Endless’s stance on not making its software open source sounds only slightly less weird than that. I know there was a lot of criticism around the time of the Kickstarter, especially on Reddit from people who didn’t understand what you’re trying to do. However, Endless’s goal for getting its hardware into people’s homes is probably not inherently doomed. But even as someone who does understand what you’re trying to do, my only reaction to hearing about the software thing is, “What?”
And that’s just at the point where we’re reasoning it out and not even when we get to the point where we start looking for evidence of how this might go. When we look for that it just reinforces the same conclusion. Among the examples we have are Canonical’s attempts to do proprietary software. Then there’s every handset division in the world who are for some reason under the bizarre notion that their closed source customizations to Android are a net benefit for themselves, despite the fact that it’s hurting all of them to point that none of them are breaking even except for Samsung, who arguably is succeeding in spite of their choices here and not because of it.
So I don’t get it. It’s like you’re trying to cripple yourselves coming out of the gate.
Has this changed?