cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/37569557
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced its project to bring mobile phone freedom to users. “Librephone” is an initiative to reverse-engineer obstacles preventing mobile phone freedom until its goal is achieved.
Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones.
You must log in or # to comment.
It sounds like they are basically doing the same thing Replicant does (they even mentioned Replicant), but based on LineageOS right now, and with enough resources to hire someone to work on reverse engineering the proprietary bits.
Not the most glamorous endeavor, but a cool and necessary project. Pretty pragmatic too, focusing on Android instead of mobile Linux.
Awesome!
Having said that, please start with an existing open source project so you won’t have to start from scratch and still be nowhere 10 years from now
They should support GrapheneOS rather than try and make something “more free” from LineageOS.
Whaaat? Drop the OG free Android distribution that has already supported hundreds of phone models across decades for a Google locked hardware with unknown future support from a vendor just announcing locking down everything they can? What is your logic?
Logic is simple: Actually have something 10 years from now.
If google restricts access to its os, like they have already started, all you’ll have is pixel up to 10/11 still supported 10 years from now. They’ve already started by no longer providing device trees in aosp for their phones, so graphene has to work harder to obtain them now. Whereas if you work on lineage, you potentially have a greater number of vendors and potentially new ones ready to open up to draw in new userbase.
Absolutely that’s an issue. But we’re not talking about that here. We are talking about a base os from where we can progress. I don’t care much for Google phones, even though I must admit they are nice phones. Google can not un-opensource AOSP. They can, to a certain extend, stop open sourcing changes, but that’s about it. Doesn’t mean we need to follow their os. Also doesn’t mean we can’t, slowly but surely, develop Android to be more of a Sandbox ontop of a newer Linux kernel than it is right now. Utopian, I know, but if Google stops AOSP developmentz what would we rather do?
No, I mean, both graphene and lineage are based on aosp. But graphene supports only one vendor. Lineageos supports many, including google. Why invest in a vendor-locked os and risk loosing it all? I think lineage is a lot more logical choice. And I’m currently running Graphene on a pixel 8, after pixel 7.
Let’s see where this leads. They have not managed so far to get GNU/Hurd production ready in the 35 years it’s been in development.
HURD is not in development by FSF. It’s a side project by professor Samuel Thibault in his spare time.
Wiki at least says: “It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation”.
So someone should fix the wiki.
That’s amazing! Phone are, IMO, the toughest frontier of privacy and autonomy. Industries have us well locked in their ecosystems
