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FSF announces Librephone project

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Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#501

Post by pessimizer »

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…

Why would the FSF be working on a problem that has absolutely no technical element? What exactly do you want them to tell your bank and your government? Why exactly can't you tell your bank and your government that?

> that is where I feel they could truly make the biggest difference for freedom for the average user.

By doing what exactly? Telling your government to change their ID policies? You seem to be complaining at your health food store about the nutrition of McDonald's food, because most people eat at McDonald's and that's where they would make the most difference.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#502

Post by sunshine-o »

soulofmischief wrote: post #434
sunshine-o wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This post was fine up until you decided to be sexist for no reason. If you're using "feminine" as an insult, professing "obvious" connotations, you need to reflect on why you have these associations.

[flagged]

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#503

Post by bogwog »

NoGravitas wrote: post #490
bogwog wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is a common misconception I see around here, probably because people think Graphene is yet another custom rom like LineageOS, and haven't actually tried it for themsel…

Banking apps will work on Graphene if you have sandboxed Google Play Services installed, and if the banking app requires only a basic level of Play Integrity attestation. I got the same level of support with my previous LineageOS for MicroG phone as I have with my current GrapheneOS phone, it just required a lot more tinkering (and was a lot less secure). I do appreciate the work the GrapheneOS team puts in toward co…

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

That page seems to be saying the opposite: hardware attestation would support GrapheneOS, whereas the Play Integrity API would not.

Anecdotally, both of the banking apps I use 'just work', and I haven't encountered any app that doesn't work. The closest thing was the Disney parks app a few years ago which would crash on launch until I disabled the hardened malloc feature for it.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#504

Post by supermatt »

fsflover wrote: post #485
supermatt wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does it matter? Because to reverse it you need to have a functionally complete baseline to compare it to. For the Librem that baseline is what it ships with (PureOS). For nearly every other device on the planet, that is Android. By them focusing on creating fully functional free drivers to swap out with the non-free driver blobs on Android, they will have created a reference source that can be adapted for any o…

You're right about the drivers, but you don't need to reverse engineer them for Librem 5: They are already free. You only need to do it for the firmware, which AFAIK doesn't depend on the OS.

"Non-free driver blobs" in the librephone context means anything needed to drive the hardware. i.e. kernel drivers, HAL modules, firmware images, user-space vendor libs, etc.

But sure, librem5 probably has most of that already.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#505

Post by NoGravitas »

kube-system wrote: post #7
bombcar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really NEED to be forced to attest if you can make your phone look like any damn PC using a browser?

I can’t tap my PC to buy a burrito at Chipotle.

I can tap my debit card to buy a burrito, no apps required on my end.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#506

Post by fsflover »

m4rtink wrote: post #314
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…

Mobile software is unfortunately not really a lego that can always be combined at will. In your examples you compare Android rebuilds with real Linux distros. The projects also have quite different goals (providing full manufacturer ROM replacement for Android on Lineage OS to reusing any old hardware to basically run servers on PostmarketOS).

> Mobile software is unfortunately not really a lego that can always be combined at will.

If we're talking about the mainline Linux, then it this looks exactly like a Lego to me. I hope that FSF will concentrate their efforts on that.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#507

Post by kristianpaul »

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…

"Librephone is the FSF's project to free up those blobs. 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. " Looks they're going to build something literally from the ground

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#508

Post by array_key_first »

LoganDark wrote: post #194
array_key_first wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still significantly more open than any other platform. Believe it or not, Mozilla is not asleep at the wheel, and neither is Apple.

I use Safari as my daily driver and I'm still routinely shocked at just how terrible certain aspects of the experience is compared to Chrome. For example, the UI seems to completely block for most of the website loading process, rather than streaming as Chrome does. Also, rather than restore the previous state when I swipe to go back, it has to reload the page from scratch. Little things like this continue to annoy m…

I've never used safari but to be fair to Firefox: I haven't experienced either on desktop. When I go back, the page loads instantly. I haven't checked the network tab but I'm assuming it's not doing a new request.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#509

Post by pabs3 »

bogwog wrote: post #503
NoGravitas wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banking apps will work on Graphene if you have sandboxed Google Play Services installed, and if the banking app requires only a basic level of Play Integrity attestation. I got the same level of support with my previous LineageOS for MicroG phone as I have with my current GrapheneOS phone, it just required a lot more tinkering (and was a lot less secure). I do appreciate the work the GrapheneOS team puts in toward co…

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu... That page seems to be saying the opposite: hardware attestation would support GrapheneOS, whereas the Play Integrity API would not. Anecdotally, both of the banking apps I use 'just work', and I haven't encountered any app that doesn't work. The closest thing was the Disney parks app a few years ago which would crash on launch until I disabled the harden…

I see "... and permitting our official release signing keys" there, which means you are swapping Google Android for GrapheneOS Android, and you can't use bogwog Android if you wanted to.

There is a list of apps banning GrapheneOS keys here, including govt apps, ticket apps, and McDonalds for some reason:

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#510

Post by NoGravitas »

bsimpson wrote: post #11

Interesting that they chose Android as a base and not one of the desktop-Linux-for-mobile ports like postmarketOS.

I think it gives them the ability to compare device support of "LineageOS with vendor kernel" and "LineageOS with unblobbed near-upstream kernel" as a measure of progress. If you get the latter working as well as the former, bringing up PostmarketOS on the same kernel is a much smaller problem.
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