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FSF announces Librephone project

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Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#361

Post by t43562 »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #357
t43562 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either software is free or it isn't. You can't have single-vision-central control and freedom. Android is an example of an effort that took something free and made a usable mobile operating system ontop of it - but lead straight back to the problem that it isn't fully free.

Hm, there is also an option to avoid creating yet another fork the moment someone said something unpopular, or to try helping improve existing solutions instead of creating yet another cool project that achieves nothing. Of course no one can be forced to do so, but that's the problem - FOSS crowd would have to actually forced to cooperate, because otherwise petty dramas sabotage any common effort.

Forks happen, I think, because someone doesn't agree with the direction or can't get accepted into the clique of people working on something.

So if you tell them it's evil to fork you're saying, in effect, stop working.

I have lots of new functions for GNU make but the chance of getting them into make is almost 0 because the maintainer doesn't like this or that aspect of anything. Fortunately, I can make a fork. If people eventually show a desire to use my fork (nobody, unfortunately!) then he might eventually change his mind or develop some competing feature to kill mine off.

That's what is happening. To get people to pull together, they have to have a reason, like money.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#362

Post by ForHackernews »

cookiengineer wrote: post #265

Why can't they just partner with postmarketOS here? Why do we have to have /e/OS instead of a better supported LineageOS, because /e/ is a 1:1 copy anyways? Why do we have to have a Librephone project now instead of partnering with say, Fairphone and the Pine64 people? Open source loses this war because proprietary devices are streamlined. The only thing that comes close to this is GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and postmark…

I prefer /e/OS to LineageOS because it includes sensible defaults (e.g. Maps app + MicroG with location providers and signature spoofing enabled) that are a pain to set up for yourself after flashing vanilla LineageOS.

/e/OS already partners with Fairphone, if you like that hardware: https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairpho...

I agree that PostmarketOS needs a lot more love, but it's very far from being a daily driver system today.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#363

Post by whitehexagon »

I'm currently hacking a toy OS in Zig on the PinePhone, and I have to say the documentation is a bit painful, or sometimes just missing, for parts of these complex SoCs, and that is meant to be a fairly open platform.

But the modem binary blob is a whole other world, and I am not sure how they could tackle that, since my understanding is that this is partly done for carrier licensing reasons? ie. to avoid abuse on the cellular networks. So isn't an open source radio driver also going to have to be licensed in the same way, and then ultimately shared as another binary blob?

The PinePhone compromise seems to be 'isolating' the modem & blob at the end of a USB link. Although I'm not 100% sure how that works yet, since I only just got the graphics & fonts working.

But even that is a bit of a puzzler, since I'm currently framebuffer-to-lcd based, but I know there is a Mali GPU hiding somewhere. I suspect that will also involve another blob. Anyway, the framebuffer approach seems fine for now, it is booting in ~2s, and the less binary blobs involved the better.

It will be interesting to see what FSF can achieve. But, personally I think they would be better focusing on a fully open-hardware dumb phone, and build upon that.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#364

Post by devjab »

rcarmo wrote: post #260

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 platf…

As an EU citizen the biggest issue for me is that even if I bought a fairphone with grapheneOS, it might as well be a "dumb" phone. This is because all the apps to make our daily lives non-annoying require the Google Play or the Apple App store. So to me it's the lack of digital sovereignty from the EU and our individual countries that is the main issue. Sure it would be nice if big tech didn't close their platforms, but that ship appears to have sailed. If they ever get around to making these apps available through a different store, then I don't see why I wouldn't want a different OS.

We still need open hardware and more companies like fairphone to utilize it, but we primarily need the EU to get it's act together and break the reliance on big tech app stores. I know there are a few companies trying to build app stores with the necessary security compliance and if the EU wants to be serious about digital sovereignty it'll need to support these.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#365

Post by m4rtink »

mike_d wrote: post #212
criddell wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones. That said, the phone market is huge. They could sell enough devices to fund future development which might be good enough even if it doesn’t slow down Apple or Google. At least then there will be a device for those of us who are not happy with the state of things.

I think they will fail because they fundamentally don't understand the problem. Android does not contain binary blobs because of some evil conspiracy against free software. If they could get away with it, the whole damn thing would be open source. The problem is those blobs do things that interact with complex hardware for which only blobs are available. Even if you reverse engineer them, you are going to get sued in…

The blobs are there to assure you need to throw away your perfectly fine phone every 3 years due to lack of software updates.

If it all was open source, the community could quite easily provide updates - you can run a modern Linux distro on 10+ years old laptop just fine.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#366

Post by pjmlp »

fsflover wrote: post #312
pjmlp wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975

If you think just by using Librephone powered device is going to be safer, good luck.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#367

Post by wolvesechoes »

saagarjha wrote: post #331
rgrs wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you quantify reach? The PR or number of projects delivered?

I value effectiveness in manifesting change in the world. This takes many forms. I think one of the most depressing and myopic views that hackers have is that code rules everything, when in fact social movements live and die upon their accessibility and impact. If you think that laboring in a cave and writing the next Free text editor is going to bring about free software, the reality is that three proprietary editor…

You are right, it is not about writing a code. That's the common problem when discussing free software among geeks.

Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc.

But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#369

Post by honkostani »

cookiengineer wrote: post #265

Why can't they just partner with postmarketOS here? Why do we have to have /e/OS instead of a better supported LineageOS, because /e/ is a 1:1 copy anyways? Why do we have to have a Librephone project now instead of partnering with say, Fairphone and the Pine64 people? Open source loses this war because proprietary devices are streamlined. The only thing that comes close to this is GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and postmark…

As in every idealistic movement, the fundamentalists(which contribute all the talk and non of the walk) hijack it and drive it into a wall.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#370

Post by [deleted] »

mcny wrote: post #327
fsflover wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need so many car models and manufacturers?

I don't mind the many multiple distributions but the default experience really sucks. For example, there should only ever be one clipboard by default. If power users want multiple, they can go out of their way to configure their device config as such. Similarly, the function keys should function as function keys on a keyboard out of the box, without us having to fiddle with config files. Also the scroll wheel click t…

[deleted]
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