Purism bundles open source apps under Librem umbrella and starts selling subscriptions

Purism, the company known for the Librem laptop and upcoming smartphone, has released a number of open source apps under its own banner and has started selling subscriptions for cloud services.

The services are collectively called Librem One, Purism writes. The first apps are online and these include an email program, chat app, social network and a VPN service. This concerns rebrands of existing open source apps, Purism writes on Wednesday. For example, the mail program is based on K9-Mail and the chat app on Riot.

Purism promises no ads and no tracking with the software, offering an alternative to services from companies that make their money from ads, such as Google. In addition to the existing apps, there will be a web storage and backup service, contacts app with sync function and a payment service. The apps appear for Android and iOS and for PureOS, the proprietary operating system that will be on the Librem 5 smartphone.

The company has started a crowdfunding campaign for the subscription service for the bundling of the apps, for $8 a month. At the time of writing, Purism has received around 1,300 of the required 5000 backers. The crowdfunding campaign will run for another two months.

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