Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FSF announces Librephone project

fsf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 669 posts

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#541

Post by M95D »

galangalalgol wrote: post #484
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…

There aren't even any arm or x86 desktops that are completely blob free. There is some ridiculously expensive amd power hungry power9 thing that nothing will run on, and some of sifive's newer boards might qualify. Every arm at least has some soc blobs. And every x86 has something like ime. Going straight for a blob free phone seems like getting ahead of ourselves. How about we shoot for a completely free rpi usable…

Rockchip AFAIK doesn't have any. It boots with mainline u-boot, but it doesn't include any wifi or other radios.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#543

Post by FirmwareBurner »

sharpshadow wrote: post #520
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's a super sexist comment. Is it? To answer this, just reverse the genders in the statement and see if it's still sexist. "It's very masculine and obviously doesn't work that well"

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#544

Post by fsflover »

RIMR wrote: post #412
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 partner with postmarketOS, LineageOS, GrapheneOS, or CalyxOS? This would be an open source initiative that contributors from any of those projects to add to. The results could be used by any of the aforementioned distributions, and more. It might even make running vanilla Linux on our exiting smartphones viable. Why partner with Fairphone and Pine64? They already have open hardware, and require zero reverse engin…

> tearing down the proprietary software barriers that prevent the vast majority of smartphone users

Are you aware that all those millions of devices require each model a dedicated reverse-engineering effort? You don't gain the coverage you're implying by concentrating on Android at all.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#545

Post by john01dav »

What I'd like to see is open standards for smart phone software: standard ways to have drivers with a stable ABI and API (the goal here is to decouple specific OSes or kernels from specific hardware, if the drivers are free that's even better but is not needed for this goal), a standard way to write data to the internal drive and to boot from internal and external drives (UEFI could work here), and bootloader locking being a thing of the past. We have this or similiar for desktops and laptops. The result of this is that I can run any of hundreds of options for my OS (any major Linux distribution, various BSD options, Windows, and more) even on very old hardware.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#546

Post by john01dav »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #483
positron26 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was exactly "Open source" that enabled Google to dominate the smartphone landscape. The financial interest may have preferred a licensing model, but either way, it was the financial interest that actually built a ton of this software. Linux isn't unpopular with businesses because of its license model. It is healthy because it found ways to plug into financial interest. The FSF will always push licensing models w…

This is the one big flaw I've seen in Stallman's philosophy on software. He's been thoroughly proven right I think about the dangers of closed-source (unmodifiable) software to user freedom. But I think his insistence that Free Software also needs to be freely redistributable with no payment to the author in order to be Free has greatly limited the resources available to build such software. The FSF will argue "you c…

We should have terms and rigorous standards for software that is proprietary but not otherwise restrictive of user freedom. Most (weighing by how commonly it's used) software is either traditional, abusive, proprietary software like Windows or Google'd Android or is fully free like Linux. But, there is a large library of software that isn't under a free license, but doesn't attempt to abuse the user into being more profitable beyond any initial sale. Examples include the Nvidia drivers on Linux (but not Windows), Jetbrains IDEs, many game engines (I'm thinking of Unreal here), and most commercial software in the 90s and 2000s. The defining feature of this is that 1) it is not under a free license; and 2) aside from basic license checks in some cases and bugs, it never does anything against the interests of the users. Having well-defined standards and terms in this area could encourage more of such software, for product designers that appreciate the promise of free software but are not convinced by its revenue options.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#547

Post by neilv »

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…

I just noticed the part about FSF Librephone being based on LineageOS (therefore, Android).

Has anyone told the FSF that it isn't "GNU/Linux"?

I suspect that Purism has the better idea for a sustainable starting point for an FSF-ish phone.

I'd be curious why FSF is barking up the Android tree again (the massive, intractable Android source code tree).

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#548

Post by Templeton2X »

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…

[dead]

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#549

Post by jrochkind1 »

M95D wrote: post #542
jrochkind1 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally, you mean? In the US? Interested in more info on this.

Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

That doesn't make sense to me, extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design. It would only be clean-room design, as the article you link to explains, if you constructed it yourself from scratch based on the functionality you understand it should have. But ok!

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#550

Post by fsflover »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #535
jraph wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not a viable business model. > You can do it obviously, but it's effectively just a different way of soliciting donations at that point; the fair market value of the software is ~$0 It is a viable business model. At XWiki SAS¹, they do this for their "Pro apps" [1] which are paid extensions for XWiki targeted to businesses and that are free software (under the LGPLv2 license) with license checks. Businesses wo…

As I said that's just another way of soliciting donations; it relies entirely on consumer goodwill (or ignorance/poor accessibility of the free option). There are limits to how big you can get with that (or how much you can charge) before someone just undercuts you with a fork. I'm not saying it's impossible to survive with that model; lots of organization survive on donations. But you're not gonna be able to build t…

> that's just another way of soliciting donations; it relies entirely on consumer goodwill (or ignorance/poor accessibility of the free option).

That's almost like saying that Netflix relies on the consumers' goodwill, since pirating is too easy. In reality, people pay for convenience in getting what they want.

Post reply on HN