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

581–590 of 669 posts

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#581

Post by supermatt »

fsflover wrote: post #529
supermatt wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> But sure, librem5 probably has most of that already. So it would be less work and would benefit more operating systems to work on it. Yet the FSF chose another hardware - I don't understand why.

Because they aren’t focusing on a specific piece of hardware… I’m really not sure what you are expecting? The librephone project to be focused on librem5 instead of the hardware used in thousands of other devices?

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#582

Post by antisol »

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…

  > we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent
Yeah I don't know that this premise is true. For a lot of examples you might give WRT war or security, I feel like some will take the approach that "if you can't do it transparently then you probably shouldn't be doing it at all".

  > 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.
Yeah but the problem here is that the FSF has this annoying track record of being proven correct, over and over again. Two of your examples are github and android: github got bought out by microsoft, and android is about to be hobbled to the point that f-droid won't work on it anymore. If you want to go and look at the history you'll see a bunch of other instances of Stallman and the FSF saying things that sound paranoid at first, but which turn out to be correct in the long run. It's genuinely annoying, life would be easier if they were wrong occasionally.

Does it still count as a cult if they're right? Do they still count as extremists if they're empirically correct? Maybe it's a good thing to have that type of extremist out there, fighting for everybody.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#583

Post by jajuuka »

I think this mission is doomed to obscurity. FSF is way late to the party and is not bringing the type of resources needed to accomplish this in an impactful way. Reverse engineering device binary blobs will take a long time regardless and by then devices will be several generations behind.

Their efforts would be better spent on building up maintainers of existing custom ROMs and partnering with open source phone hardware initiatives like Pinephone. Maybe even go the route of HarmonyOS and run a completely different kernel and support Android app emulation. They should be looking ahead and not trying to match functionality today and it changes around them.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#584

Post by jajuuka »

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…

Historically we have seen bumps in Linux usage because of cross-platform support. Either officially or unofficially. So I agree that focusing on making that transition more seamless will be of more benefit than telling people they need to use something different or suck it up. There is a reason rooting and making banking and other high security apps functional has been pretty popular.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#585

Post by TranquilMarmot »

styanax wrote: post #422
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposedly Graphene is partnering with a major OEM (they say "one of the top 10") to get better hardware support. Even then they're still at the whim of Google, though - the most recent QPR1 update still has not been pushed to AOSP even after many weeks. Supposedly partnering with an OEM means they get these updates quicker but who knows.

You may have missed this, it's only been ~11 days since the post but they've got a solution now, with the first release having happened: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27068-grapheneos-security-p...

This is a security patch which is different from the QPR1 release. _Supposedly_ once they partner with an OEM they will get more reliable access which would be nice, but I'm hesitant. I switched my Pixel 8 Pro to Graphene a few months ago and really like it.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#586

Post by SchemaLoad »

qingcharles wrote: post #521
mcny wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The camera is also surprisingly software dependent. Using the pixel camera vs using default configuration with an app called open camera, the difference is so clear. The camera is basically all software — the images are pure trash before processing.

Can you access the camera, though? I thought full access to the camera sensor was locked down only to awful Samsung apps?

It's been many years since I did android rom stuff but how it was back then was that yes you can access the camera, but you lose the proprietary image processing pipeline which exists just as software. So your photos come out looking much worse since phone cameras rely heavily on software to look good.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#587

Post by TZubiri »

antisol wrote: post #582
TZubiri wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent Yeah I don't know that this premise is true. For a lot of examples you might give WRT war or security, I feel like some will take the approach that "if you can't do it transparently then you probably shouldn't be doing it at all". > I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that ar…

"Yeah but the problem here is that the FSF has this annoying track record of being proven correct, over and over again"

It's not that FSF is proven correct, it's that the FSF disapproves of 99.9% of software, it's easy for them to look back when there's a scandal and say "see? we told you so.". Too many false positives.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#588

Post by gorgoiler »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #475
gorgoiler wrote: post #248

It is very inspiring to see a project announced like this with the developer’s name attached to it. As someone who has always struggled with the confidence to be open about my work, let alone work openly in public, it feels extremely inspiring to see Rob Savoye (and Zoe and John behind him) nail their plans to the door like this. My thrill is matched in strength by the loathing I have for this Apple device on which I…

> The two major phone OS companies both stand on the shoulders of IBM PC, openly bootable hardware, and the fantastic software systems nurtured and built on top of these platforms — the BSDs, GNU, Linux, and the long tail of all that run on them. It is very troubling that their own platforms are the antithesis of being openly hackable. I can kinda see a lineage from the PC to Android, if only by way of Linux being bo…

It’s a fine thread, but the links from FreeBSD to Darwin are real, and Darwin is behind macOS and iOS. Not just as a kernel, but a lot of the runtime and many of the auxiliary pieces of software too.

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#589

Post by a456463 »

TZubiri wrote: post #587
antisol wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent Yeah I don't know that this premise is true. For a lot of examples you might give WRT war or security, I feel like some will take the approach that "if you can't do it transparently then you probably shouldn't be doing it at all". > I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that ar…

"Yeah but the problem here is that the FSF has this annoying track record of being proven correct, over and over again" It's not that FSF is proven correct, it's that the FSF disapproves of 99.9% of software, it's easy for them to look back when there's a scandal and say "see? we told you so.". Too many false positives.

too many false positives means you should reconsider what you call a false positive

Re: FSF announces Librephone project

#590

Post by a456463 »

akagusu wrote: post #449
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…

> Open source loses this war because proprietary devices are streamlined. "Open source" didn't loose because it didn't fight anything. It was exactly "Open source" that enabled Google to dominate the smartphone landscape. FSF and many other have been warning us for decades that Android been open source didn't matter because firmware, play store and many other components of Android were proprietary. People gave a shit…

PREACH. Sorry. I felt heard and seen!
Post reply on HN