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FSF announces Librephone project

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Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#391

Post by t43562 »

raverbashing wrote: post #385
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.

> You can't have single-vision-central control and freedom But that's how a lot of projects do: Apache for instance, nginx, or llvm. The problem is not being OSS, it is the lack of focus, and a game where everybody brings their ball and are playing the way they want instead of an unified game

To take LLVM as a convenient example ... why does it exist? Why didn't Apple pour its money into GCC?

Why does nginx exist? They could simply have found that config bug in Apache that made Apache slower and we wouldn't have needed another web server...?

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#392

Post by ookdatnog »

honkostani wrote: post #369
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.

Your statement is wrong in two distinct ways:

- Fundamentalists never hijacked the FSF, they founded it: Stallman is about as fundamentalist as possible about free software.

- In the case of the FSF, the fundamentalists are absolutely walking the walk, both in terms of contributing software, and in terms of going out of their way to not use proprietary software.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#393

Post by gitgud »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #296
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…

Why do we have to have million Linux distros? Why do we have to have dozen desktop environments? Because in FOSS world every single actor is a snowflake with unique vision. Any form of cooperation ends up in drama and moral accusations.

The FOSS world is primarily about freedom. You don’t have to align with someone else’s vision, you don’t need to be profitable, you don’t need to care about other projects

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#394

Post by penguin_booze »

Ugh, I don't know. From a practical standpoint, I can see why basing on Android makes sense. But I really wish we can "somehow" extend an existing Linux distribution (or an Android kernel, even) with a user space reworked to function well on small screens. Maybe that's a pipe dream.

What I'd really, really prefer is to be able to program the device with the same ease as developing a local Linux application. If I need a UI, I'd rather that be a web front end, and not something that needs GBs and GBs of special IDEs and other bloatware. That way, we don't need specialised "apps" for each and every thing: any service that already has website, should work as it is. Just point a browser at it.

And how do I tweak an "app's" UI if I must, rather than beholden to it? That's right: web extensions.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#395

Post by supermatt »

fsflover wrote: post #386
supermatt wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR or something? They aren't making an OS. The project is about opening up the closed blobs that mobile chipsets use: "This project's goal is not another Android distribution, but a long-term project to better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by virtually all SoCs made today."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589873

Thats clearly not what the OP is suggesting as per "Why do we have to have /e/OS instead of a better supported LineageOS, because /e/ is a 1:1 copy anyways?". Both cases are android. /e/OS is not librephone.

There's little point in "partnering" with postmarketOS, because the project is literally about clean room reversing the proprietary blobs found in android devices: https://librephone.fsf.org/site/ - there are no commercial phones using postmarketOS with blobs to reverse engineer.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#396

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

oblio wrote: post #383
dandellion wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Stallman had only given given us Emacs and we ignored everything else he has ever done, he'd still have given us more and brought more people involved in free software than this new crop of MBA/communications degree CEOs that has taken over ever will.

We need more Torvalds and Van Rossums and Kawaguchis than Stallmans.

Not really. Without Stallman, there would be no Torvalds.

After Stallman launched the GNU project, the emergence of GNU licensed kernel for x86 architecture was inevitable. It just happened that Linux became that kernel. Had it not, the GNU project folks led by rms would have inevitably made their own.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#397

Post by ric2b »

fsflover wrote: post #353
sznio wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding of the article, Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. The goal is to provide FOSS drivers, so that you can run Lineage without proprietary blobs copied from the distribution of Android provided by the device manufacturer. It's mainly a libre purity project. A Lineage user won't be able to tell a thing, but the system will be "ethical…

> Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. Any OS "is able" to use anything from any other OS - in theory and given infinite resources. In practice though, it makes a huge difference when something works by default.

No, software licensing often gets in the way.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#398

Post by wrasee »

sznio wrote: post #342
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…

>by the time you have it worked out, the phone is obsolete and very few people still use it. If you work out a phone from 5 years ago, you're not that far off from a phone of today. Nobody designs it all from scratch, you mostly modify the old one. Getting the foundations going will take years - adapting the foundation to a different phone of the same series will only take months.

Hardware is hard. It doesn’t always have the transparent composability that software has because you hit physics and the real world.

The example already given makes the point. Work has been great on the M1 but my understanding is that this has not translated all that well to e.g. M2, M3 and M4.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#399

Post by theobreuerweil »

gtsnexp wrote: post #378
sunshine-o wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This take is gatekeeping and sexist. Coding is not the job description for FSF leadership; policy, licensing, and funding are. The previous, highly effective former FSF executive director was a poet, not a programmer. Focus on outcomes: mainline kernels, modem firmware, reproducible builds, verified boot, power management, app ecosystems, and sustained funding. Credit the projects pushing those fronts and press FSF t…

I personally think it's unfair to accuse this person of sexism. I didn't even know he was talking about a woman until you pointed it out. It's possible that this comment comes from a place of sexism, and it's possible that it doesn't. It's uncharitable to just assume the former.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#400

Post by [deleted] »

MYEUHD wrote: post #288
sunshine-o wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> the FSF is at least 15 years late to really launch something in that space Not really. https://replicant.us is an FSF-supported project. But it kind of died due to the lack of contributors. IMHO, postmarketOS is better than Replicant or any other Android Rom, because it doesn't depend on Android.

[deleted]
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