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.
I think this intiative is spot on. I would describe current approach of 2 major OS vendors, Google and Microsoft as such:
Microsoft demands standardization at firmware level via UEFI, ACPI etc. because they bring OS kernel and userspace.
Google demands Linux API version and brings just userspace.
In theory Google approach better facilitates open ecosystem but each OEM treats Linux kernel as just a firmware blob so the end situation is actually worse.
On the PC we have standardized firmware while Android chases Linux API levels each release and thus undermines the whole ecosystem.
So they could do it for pixels and this open source firmware could be used by Graphene OS, for example?
Yes, though the future of GrapheneOS on Pixels after 10 is currently in question
The issue is that for the FSF, what they call “software freedom” is their number one goal. So what’s likely to happen is that they create some kind of “deblobbed” firmware that breaks many features and security of the device, which Graphene OS will refuse to use.
I hope this project will be useful but am worried that they’ll just make a shittier version of someone else’s work like they did with e.g. Libreboot.
The project’s aim is to create an Android-compatible OS. I like the Linux-on-phone approach of postmarketOS better but whatever they end up working on should end up benefitting both projects since they’ll probably just be contributing driver code like postmarketOS. It’s weird that they don’t even mention postmarketOS in the announcement.
This is amazing news!
I’m glad the fsf is actually taking it upon itself to create more solutions especially since it has become increasingly irrelevant throughout these years and sadly been replaced by the corporate “open source” hellscape.
We need free software, not “open source” corporate bullshit. Open source was invented in the first place as a way to get people from being radicalized by the free software movement, since it would take money out of their filthy, greedy pockets.
I don’t know as much about phones as I do with computers but would I still be able to contribute in any way?
I’m trying to fund these projects. It might not be much, but but a little bit now and then might make a difference.
A dedicated community has been created for this, see https://lemmy.ml/c/librephone (I just saw this community and joined myself)
As long it is not liberated hardware from blobs it all is useless.
