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FSF announces Librephone project

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Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#251

Post by seba_dos1 »

linmob wrote: post #242
neilv wrote: post #146

> The FSF has been supporting earlier free software mobile phone projects such as Replicant, Hopefully this project will go better than Replicant. Here are my notes on running Replicant on the (then already very old) flagship Samsung GT-I9300: https://www.neilvandyke.org/replicant/ The hardware was a little difficult to obtain in the US, and WiFi worked only with a blob of questionable provenance. It looks like Repli…

I am pretty sure that it's not going to be the Librem 5, despite Purism's efforts to get it RYF certified (which, thinking of the Redpine WiFi card) went so far that they seriously impacted user experience. Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS. Even the PINE64 PinePhone would be more likely, as that has Android support and even some LineageOS 22 support [1]. The Replicant pr…

You make it sound like the Redpine card ended up being shitty because of RYF efforts. The Redpine card was chosen because of its internal flash, but the fact that the vendor failed to properly support the advertised features (and even removed some that worked before), abandoned its mainline driver and pretty much halted the firmware development after SiLabs acquisition is orthogonal to that and could have happened with a different card as well. So nice it was a replaceable M.2 card, isn't it? ;)

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#252

Post by lmm »

koolala wrote: post #234
lmm wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What type are transactions are you talking about? Bank transfers and I guess direct debit authorisations (if your bank requires you to confirm those) and reauthorisation/confirmation of card payments that were blocked by the bank's fraud detection. I think those are the only kinds of transactions one would ever use a PC for? I mean for me most of my day-to-day transactions are me paying by debit card in a shop, but…

Do you have to authorize those day-to-day transactions with your debit card on your phone every time?

No. Only to unblock when they get blocked/flagged as fraud (tends to happen for large transactions like plane tickets or buying a bunch of furniture), and even then I currently have the option of authorizing via the web browser (and I think also via phone call).

But sending a bank transfer is also a fairly common day-to-day transaction that I do a couple of times a month (and is the only way to pay for some government services like tax certificates short of visiting the tax office in person). Authorising a new direct debit happens occasionally (joined a gym, changed my utility provider, got a new credit card, that kind of thing).

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#253

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Meta-commentary: At least within the HN community there seems to be a strong interest in a pursuit such as this, given that this is at the top of the front page, and has been for a little while, plus the first page has simultaneously contained these two stories:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584498

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585869

It's heartening.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#254

Post by squarefoot »

I applaud the move, but it's going to be really hard if manufacturers aren't willing to document their chipsets and keep bootloaders locked. The folks at Pine64 were forced to waste resources to develop their own platform, which after the enormous effort ant time invested resulted outdated the day it came out of the factory, because of that.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#255

Post by pjmlp »

torben-friis wrote: post #224
SchemaLoad wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to complain, but I can't help but feel this is kind of impossible with the resources available to the people working on it. Reverse engineering a modern phone would take years and years of work from many people, and by the time you have it worked out, the phone is obsolete and very few people still use it. The Apple Silicon macbooks seem a good example. The M1 came out about 5 years ago now and with a whole pr…

One would hope that enough things stay similar between devices that replacing, say, the galaxy s25 paves the way for a far easier implementation of the s26, particularly now that the market is stagnating a bit. And I’m not knowledgeable about this at all, but intuitively I’d expect apple stuff to be much more customized than the average android phone - they’re famous for vertical integration and owning the end to end…

Phones aren't x86, each is own snowflake, and on Android the nature of being a managed userspace, means there is a certain freedom regarding which ARM designs that Samsung, Qualcomm, Mediatek, and whatever else is out there comes up with.

Then there is everything else that happens to be on the motherboard.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#256

Post by pjmlp »

goku12 wrote: post #247
eptcyka wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it is this late, it might as well have been never.

That's certainly not the case here, even if it's true sometimes. The duopoly is gradually tightening their grip on the customers' wallets. It's worth it at any stage to reverse their cash grab.

This is bound to fail unless they get the full stack and even then, it will be for specific phone models, x86 is an anomaly in having a cloning freedom that IBM did not intended.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#257

Post by zozbot234 »

linmob wrote: post #242
neilv wrote: post #146

> The FSF has been supporting earlier free software mobile phone projects such as Replicant, Hopefully this project will go better than Replicant. Here are my notes on running Replicant on the (then already very old) flagship Samsung GT-I9300: https://www.neilvandyke.org/replicant/ The hardware was a little difficult to obtain in the US, and WiFi worked only with a blob of questionable provenance. It looks like Repli…

I am pretty sure that it's not going to be the Librem 5, despite Purism's efforts to get it RYF certified (which, thinking of the Redpine WiFi card) went so far that they seriously impacted user experience. Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS. Even the PINE64 PinePhone would be more likely, as that has Android support and even some LineageOS 22 support [1]. The Replicant pr…

> Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.

The LineageOS folks are working on supporting their OS on Linux-first devices running a close-to-mainline (not AOSP) kernel. So it could go either way. Of course if they do choose an Android-first device, their efforts would ultimately also make it easier to run a mainline kernel on it as shown by projects like pmOS.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#258

Post by seba_dos1 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #257
linmob wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure that it's not going to be the Librem 5, despite Purism's efforts to get it RYF certified (which, thinking of the Redpine WiFi card) went so far that they seriously impacted user experience. Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS. Even the PINE64 PinePhone would be more likely, as that has Android support and even some LineageOS 22 support [1]. The Replicant pr…

> Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS. The LineageOS folks are working on supporting their OS on Linux-first devices running a close-to-mainline (not AOSP) kernel. So it could go either way. Of course if they do choose an Android-first device, their efforts would ultimately also make it easier to run a mainline kernel on it as shown by projects like pmOS.

That's nice to know. Do you happen to have some links to where I could read up more on this effort?

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#259

Post by pjmlp »

kovac wrote: post #49
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #4

Ultimately, I don't think the most important challenge is in binary firmware blobs, but the software which people depend upon to run their lives. What does it matter if you can run a completely free software stack on your phone, if your bank software (or your required government ID, as is looking depressingly likely) requires you to run a Big Tech approved phone OS? Perhaps the FSF can't do much about that, but that…

I think this is the right place to start. A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there. If the OS is tightly controlled, we have no recourse. Even in the worst case scenario, we could use a cheap big-tech-approved phone for these applications (a glorified digital token) and use the free phone for everything else. When there's enough adoption and t…

Like they have been doing for Desktop Linux?

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#260

Post by rcarmo »

Well… mixed feelings here. I spent a lot of time dealing with early smartphones and hacking away at Android, Tizen, FirefoxOS (remember that?) and several variations on that theme back when manufacturers were vying for differentiation, and I get that the FSF has a mission, but I don’t see this panning out.

Like many folk who’ve been watching Google’s gradual shutdown of AOSP and alignment with Apple in terms of platform lockdown, I think the days of fully open devices are actually coming to a close. Again, I applaud the FSF’s initiative, but you need to get a lot of buy-in for this kind of thing to work—-manufacturers, developers (both OS and app devs), and, of course, users, who will never accept anything that doesn’t let them do things like banking, shopping, mainstream social apps, etc.

And you can’t do a lot of those on an unlocked boot loader (which I think is going to be the logical consequence of replacing bits of the OS) without more hacking. It’s like XML and violence—-it will only lead to more of the same.

I expect the usual amount of “you can do that with web apps” pushback, but let’s be real. Except in markets like India where simpler and vastly cheaper platforms make sense, you either use iOS, Android, or… nothing but voice calls, and I don’t see enough here to make me think this will be something for everyone.

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