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FSF announces Librephone project

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Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#551

Post by TZubiri »

kristianpaul wrote: post #507
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

I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.

I make a parallel with politics and transparency, a software lead once told me that a completely transparent government was tried in the french revolution and it kind of didn't work. For example, we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent. I feel that free software would obsess over that private fraction because for all you know it might hold all of the secrets and evil that you imagine.

That said, it is possible that under the guise of reasonable need for private blobs/three-letter-agencies, a lot of other 'evil' things may be hidden. Maybe they say it's due to security or IP concerns, to provide protection against device tampering, to avoid pollution of radiofrequency spectrums, but it's possible that in reality they are hiding spying software in the wifi firmware and hardware keystores?

I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that are ok to have closed source, then they could be taken seriously, otherwise they will just be ignored and leave room for precisely the kind of misuse of closed source that they fear. This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.

Extremism begets extremism, if the jails are too full (or too empty), advocating for the other extreme will get you nowhere, the Overton Window doesn't quite apply, in fact it can be harmful as you are providing a real threat to the other extreme.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#552

Post by worik »

TZubiri wrote: post #551
kristianpaul wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved. I make a parallel with politics and transparency, a software lead once told me that a completely transparent government was tried in the french revolution and it kind of didn't work. For example, we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent. I…

> free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.

That is the nature of software. 1% is too much. It is Free or it is not

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#553

Post by tyler-dot-earth »

fsflover wrote: post #281
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 are all commenters on HN ignoring the only smartphone running an FSF-endorsed [0] operating system, Librem 5, and only list everything else? I just can't get it. Even the FSF themselves didn't mention it or provided any reasoning for choosing a Google-controlled operating system - despite recommending Librem 5 earlier [1]. What am I missing? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641 [1] https://www.fsf.or…

as someone who has followed this phone for a long time, it has had an image problem - fairly old hardware, early software/buggy, and bad customer service experiences.

i'm still pretty tempted to play with one.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#554

Post by ruszki »

guerrilla wrote: post #537
ruszki wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are studies about this. A lot. Many of them garbage, because their reference points were garbage (like 2008), or flat out lied, but it's quite clear that even if it matters on C-level jobs, it's miniscule. It was studied a lot because of Norway, and the following countries in Europe. Either it was pure sexism to have a distorted sex distribution, or C-level jobs don't really matter for companies outlook. I don'…

I don't know what you're trying to say but we weren't talking about companies or countries. We were talking about leadership of a political movement. It's a revolutionary ideology, not a business.

Yes, but that shows that there is no real lack of qualifications by sex, just lack of opportunity. And that’s the best data which you can get today.

Do you have any data which shows that the type of leadership must be so different which affects this? Because if not, then you can infer only one thing from that data, and not what you did.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#555

Post by devmor »

fsflover wrote: post #531
devmor wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's one of those situations where the potential for legal system abuse is a chilling effect.

Can you elaborate?

Such as when it's technically legal to do something as long as you do it a certain way, but the interested parties may not believe that you did it correctly and will bury you in legal discovery requests that financially ruin you or force you to stop.

Or they sue anyways hoping for a favorable ruling that changes the interpretation of the law (Oracle v. Google for a famous example of this)

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#557

Post by guerrilla »

ruszki wrote: post #554
guerrilla wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what you're trying to say but we weren't talking about companies or countries. We were talking about leadership of a political movement. It's a revolutionary ideology, not a business.

Yes, but that shows that there is no real lack of qualifications by sex, just lack of opportunity. And that’s the best data which you can get today. Do you have any data which shows that the type of leadership must be so different which affects this? Because if not, then you can infer only one thing from that data, and not what you did.

I think you're lost in the weeds. If you don't know anything about software, you're not qualified to talk about software. The end.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#558

Post by fsflover »

tyler-dot-earth wrote: post #553
fsflover wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are all commenters on HN ignoring the only smartphone running an FSF-endorsed [0] operating system, Librem 5, and only list everything else? I just can't get it. Even the FSF themselves didn't mention it or provided any reasoning for choosing a Google-controlled operating system - despite recommending Librem 5 earlier [1]. What am I missing? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641 [1] https://www.fsf.or…

as someone who has followed this phone for a long time, it has had an image problem - fairly old hardware, early software/buggy, and bad customer service experiences. i'm still pretty tempted to play with one.

> fairly old hardware

How new do you think the chosen Android hardware will be at the end of the promised reverse-engineering efforts?

See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

It's fast enough and stable enough to serve me (and many other people, including in the HN comments) as a daily driver.

> bad customer service experiences

This depends: Purism is a quite small company, and sometimes they take time to reply, but the community at forums.puri.sm has been really helpful. I'm a happy user.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#559

Post by Arainach »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #471
Arainach wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No software is "easy to inspect". Only a tiny fraction of users will ever even try. When things are inspected and problems are found, you need a way to revoke the malicious bits. You'll never notify everyone, which is one of the roles app stores play. You trust hardware and software by establishing boundaries. We figured this out long ago with the kernel mode/user mode privilege check and other things. You want apps…

> You trust hardware and software by establishing boundaries. We figured this out long ago with the kernel mode/user mode privilege check and other things. You want apps to be heavily locked down/sandboxed, and you want the OS to enforce it, but every time you do you go up against the principles of open source absolutists like the FSF. "What do you mean my app can't dig into the storage layer and read the raw image f…

Users can't be trusted. They don't read. You can put a popup that flashes in all caps saying "THIS WILL GIVE ACCESS TO YOUR BANK ACCOUNT" and users will blindly click OK to get to whatever they think they want, be that an Instagram feed, a game, or whatever.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030901-00/?p=42...

It was true 22 years ago and is even more true today.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#560

Post by SEJeff »

TZubiri wrote: post #551
kristianpaul wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved. I make a parallel with politics and transparency, a software lead once told me that a completely transparent government was tried in the french revolution and it kind of didn't work. For example, we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent. I…

Free software is by its very nature dogmatic. Stallman himself makes cringey jokes and references to the “church of gnu”. It’s more of a way of life than a way to develop software. By design, a religion is only happy with 100%.

Open source is just pragmatic and is very happy with the 99% being open source. It’s more corporate and doesn’t generally care at all about the dogma.

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