Finally! It took the FSF long enough to catch up with the overwhelming usage of mobile devices, but it's better late than never.
I like that this project is trying to tackle something much more challenging that can't be done with just software: reverse engineering device firmware and binary blobs, the pieces of software that actually make hardware components interface with an OS. Understanding how this stuff functions is key to being able to write replacement software, so we may have less non-free software to deal with. I don't have any experience in trying to reverse engineer software, so the best I can do for now is cheer on from outside, unless I want to try my hands at this stuff later.
I also like that this project is not intending to produce an Android-based distro, but focusing more on reverse engineering. Although I read that the results are targeted at helping developers of Android-compatible OSes, the results can hopefully be used by non-Android [GNU/]Linux distros and perhaps other *nix stuff, like the BSD distros. The FSF (by way of developer Rob Savoye) recognizing that a project like this is not going to be quick, easy, or cheap, and is a long term effort is good, as that likely means this project isn't going to be easily abandoned just because of not being able to produce quick results.
I hope that this whole effort can eventually let us break free of the Apple-Google mobile device duopoly, as it sure is getting tiring for me to stick with one of these two companies for my mobile computing needs.
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a modern phone would take years and years of work from many people, and by the time you have it worked out, the phone is obsolete and very few people still use it.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 project and a lot of work later there is still limited hardware support. Having to put this effort in for all the models of phones seems massive.
One would hope that enough things stay similar between devices that replacing, say, the galaxy s25 paves the way for a far easier implementation of the s26, particularly now that the market is stagnating a bit.
And I’m not knowledgeable about this at all, but intuitively I’d expect apple stuff to be much more customized than the average android phone - they’re famous for vertical integration and owning the end to end process.
Phones aren't x86, each is own snowflake, and on Android the nature of being a managed userspace, means there is a certain freedom regarding which ARM designs that Samsung, Qualcomm, Mediatek, and whatever else is out there comes up with.
Then there is everything else that happens to be on the motherboard.
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.
>Using the pixel camera vs using default configuration with an app called open camera, the difference is so clear.
Is this hardware dependent though?
I ask because I’ve seen custom android mods that port the pixel camera, presumably if that works for other devices it’s a good sign that postprocessing can be decoupled from specific hardware.
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.
On the other hand, you can take DNG RAW images and do the software processing later, except exactly the way you want. I rather like that flexibility, myself.
>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.
1) The article states they are focusing on the phone model that they guess will require the least work to become totally free. This may make the project useless, but it does give it some hope of finishing.
2) The hope is that the M2-M5 won’t be that different from the M1 models - after all, Apple doesn’t want to spend their money reinventing the wheel without compelling reason. I think that is less likely with phones from different manufacturers, though Android phones typically share a lot of single source components.
They're aiming to perfect their support for M1/M2 prior to working on the M3 and later models. Seems like a sensible choice, given that even a baseline M1 or M2 Mac is still a highly compelling device for a vast majority of uses. And Asahi will become more relevant as these devices cease to be supported by newer releases of macOS.
>a baseline M1 or M2 Mac is still a highly compelling device for a vast majority of uses.
Maybe in 2020. Lenovo released an ARM chromebook this summer which has benchmark performance of M1/M2 chips and is perfectly supported by Linux (ChromeOS) out of the box.
Yes it will take many years. This whole thing has already played out with FSF and Replicant. They ended up stuck working on a couple of ever aging devices as many new generations of devices were launched and all the technologies in smartphones evolved.
If people want open devices they should maybe better explore open hardware. Im not talking about devices, like Librem where the schematics are open but the chips, which are the parts which do all the work, are all closed, but rather devices with open silicon.
> The Apple Silicon macbooks seem a good example. The M1 came out about 5 years ago now and with a whole project and a lot of work later there is still limited hardware support. Having to put this effort in for all the models of phones seems massive.
Apple Silicon isn't a single SoC. They have support for the M1 and M2 lines across both Macbooks, the Mini, iMac and Studio.
It's the same thing with phones, isn't it? You're not starting over for each individual phone. First you get one device working which uses some popular chip, which is a large undertaking. But then all the other devices that use the same chip are nearly working and it's not a matter of starting over, it's a matter of mapping the couple of changes they made to the base design.
Meanwhile the chip designs themselves are incremental, so the 2026 device is really the 2023 device with a die shrink and a new feature.
That's certainly not the case here, even if it's true sometimes. The duopoly is gradually tightening their grip on the customers' wallets. It's worth it at any stage to reverse their cash grab.
This is bound to fail unless they get the full stack and even then, it will be for specific phone models, x86 is an anomaly in having a cloning freedom that IBM did not intended.
Open firmware is but one part of the equation. The evolutionary pressure of state actors trying to deploy malware on iOS and Android forces those platforms to develop vulnerability mitigations and security architectures that currently just are not matched by anything in FOSS. Desktop linux is woefully insecure compared to these platforms. I don't want it to be, but it seems that, unless you are ready to use Qubes, no one has the time and effort to further the security of desktop linux in any meaningful way.
> Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS.
The time is right for this project I hope they succeed.
The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.
That said, the phone market is huge. They could sell enough devices to fund future development which might be good enough even if it doesn’t slow down Apple or Google. At least then there will be a device for those of us who are not happy with the state of things.
> because people are generally happy with their phones.
Maybe thats exactly why it can succeed now. The phone tech has plateud to the point where a 5 year old phone performs almost identically as a new one and this is when people can afford to experiment and take more risks.
Also its much easier for free software to catch up now as most problems are already solved and/or easy to copy.
I don't mind having a second phone, esp. if it's a foldable which can be a great reader and a small "linux in a pocket". There might even be some use-cases, for example I recently wanted to implement a type-c external GPS antenna, and found out that it's a pain on Android (done via "developer mode" hacks etc.), and impossible on iOS.
That being said, very low expectations on this project.
I'm not. Samsung treats my phone like dirt. I'd love to have some actual ownership of a device I spent $900 on last year.
I don't think my wife is happy with her iPhone either. She bought one of those little NFC fridge magnet things that locks your phone out of social media apps. She and I are dissatisfied in different ways, but there's a theme here.
The project will accomplish much if those who want it have better choices, even if they’re not perfect.
They don’t need to replace or even challenge Apple and Google for market adoption, just be there and be a viable alternative used by a noticeable minority of people.
Getting half as far as desktop linux would be a fantastic achievement.
> much because people are generally happy with their phones.
Talked to many iPhone owners this year? The 17 hardware has a bizarre choice of a camera button / pointless physical change, and IOS 26 is pretty much hated by everyone.
I use iPhone, and have happily for years but F if this isn’t the worst OS I can remember. The first downgrade really.
Have you been around when iOS 7 was released? If not, I’d say that was the same, whatever that means. Things might get better, but we’re not entitled to it.
I think they will fail because they fundamentally don't understand the problem.
Android does not contain binary blobs because of some evil conspiracy against free software. If they could get away with it, the whole damn thing would be open source.
The problem is those blobs do things that interact with complex hardware for which only blobs are available. Even if you reverse engineer them, you are going to get sued into oblivion because of the patents you are going to need to infringe on to make functional replacements.
But even if you get a blessing from the component manufacturers, your new hippie binary blobs need to be certified to legally operate on cellular and wifi frequencies in most parts of the world. If you decide you don't like something and change it - as is the open source way - that new version with your modifications needs to be certified too. Carriers do not allow uncertified devices on their networks.
> If they could get away with it, the whole damn thing would be open source.
Who is "they"? Certainly not Google. Google has been moving open-source Android functionality into the closed-source Google Play Services for many years.
No one is going sue the fsf into oblivion. The movement has decades of legal experience, if a company would be dumb enough that company would just burn money and lose. Especially about reverse engineering software, as if patents had any power there. Apple, the end boss in that regard, not fighting on that level against the m1 project is proof enough.
Second, fuck the carriers. Certifications will not persist as soon as real Foss phones are available. Nothing persists against a world of free hardware invading a realm. And even if: freeing everything around a modem blob would still be a big step forward.
It's frankly ridiculous to assume the people working on this and the organisation that already supported replicant knowns nothing about the mobile space.
I understand it might seem confusing if you are not familiar with the requirements, but they are not trivial to bypass.
Cell phones operate in licensed radio spectrum, so they need to have proper testing and certification (https://www.fcc.gov/oet/ea/rfdevice). Any device not properly certified would be illegal to manufacture or import into the US.
Separately cellular networks require PTCRB certification of the devices to ensure they are interoperable with the network (https://www.ptcrb.com/). The FSF could in theory write custom firmware for baseband and wifi chips, but they would need to seek certification as this would be considered a substantial modification. It would likely require cooperation from the chip manufactures to provide samples with various testing/debugging harnesses enabled.
Qualcomm and the like would probably sue to stop the FSF on the basis that it could put their own device certifications into jeopardy.
That isn't even touching on non-transmitting components like GPUs or sensors where the actual functional logic may be split between hardware and software (your blob driver). Even by doing a clean room reimplementation, you risk infringing on software patents, and will have little flexibility to work around them since the hardware will expect things to be done a specific way.
You would think it would be ridiculous to assume the people working on this know nothing about the mobile space, yet their actions do bring that into question.
I think all your concerns are valid but they are not necessarily insurmountable. The FSF or whatever other entity could do just what you suggest and seek certification within the current legal frameworks. They could also talk to the carriers and negotiate individually which is probably going to be quite annoying and slow but it's not impossible and it's not like that's not done in the commercial space. The could build mechanisms into the hard-/firmware that takes your device off whatever regulated spectrum/provider if you modify anything that is in regulated territory (as watched over by some form of maintainer-quorum-signing-negotiation-structure). I'm sure there are many mechanisms and processes one could come up with that could keep with regulatory or other control aspects while still keeping things open.
All that patent and legal business is probably a more important/existential concern and a go/nogo-factor if you want to be a commercial player in a market-driven environment and less so for an entity like the FSF.
> The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.
Is there survey data available on this? Anecdotally, everybody I know hates their phones. In fact, I think if you asked, "what's the biggest pain point in your life right now?" I think most people will point to their phones.
You might need to expand your social circle a bit.
If you asked normal average people "what's the biggest pain point in your life right now?" they would point to financial, societal, or health issues.
The vast majority of people when asked specifically about their phones probably wish that they were a newer model or had a longer battery life. As long as it communicates with people, lets them access banking and social media, and has a few of their niche hobby/entertainment apps nobody actually cares about the licensing of the modem firmware or the fact you can't install TempleOS on it.
Maybe, but that pain point isn't something free software is going to fix. Obviously not everyone has the same problems with their phone, but largely I think they fall into a few categories: notification overload, apps designed to keep you scrolling for every last minute of the day, and dark patterns or other design choices aimed at separating users from as much of their money as possible.
Every single one of these is fixable on any modern phone. Stop using social media, take a hatchet to what apps can send you notifications and when, and be more mindful of what tricks are commonly deployed to steal your attention, time, and money.
But people can't even manage that. They don't even have to do anything, they just have to stop doing certain things, but they can't or won't. Those same people aren't going to go through the effort to switch, and even if they did they would end up re-creating the same thing that makes them miserable currently.
Indeed, this is the right time. I really want to daily drive a linux phone, but i dont want to buy a used phone. I hope this brings more hardware support for newer phones.
I'm willing to suffer a rough beta or alpha experience, but let me use modern hardware of my choice.
I'm kinda the opposite, I don't want to buy new any more. Currently rocking a 2nd hand Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS and loving it.
If battery life is the issue, that's fair enough. I've bought a couple of wireless charging docks that I spread around the places I frequently spend my time, so if it needs a boost I can charge her up just by plonking it on the dock. Most of the time, though, she makes it through the day from (maximum charge for battery longevity reasons) 80% down to 30%, maybe 25% or 20% if there's lots of interesting news in a day.
But I'm not a particularly heavy user and I don't game on it.
As the first project FSF has launched in years with a current budget of one developer I expect they will be happy to spend new donations on further funding for it. However, it is very uncommon for a nonprofit to have a separate fund for a project that is part of the organization itself, rather than a project which makes semi-independent decisions and is fiscally sponsored by a related nonprofit. The exception is usually when some very large donor which insists on that arrangement.
I was talking to someone who is involved in a nature conservation nonprofit recently - small donations go into the general pot of money for the organization to choose how to spend it. If you want to influence what the money is used for you have to donate a significantly higher sum. They said they like having many small donors because they can fund things that don't necessarily make a big splash in a press release but are important precursors to impact (e.g. researching what projects would have the most impact vs actually implementing a project).
Upon commenting, I removed the snarky part of the website being visually… well, bad. After all, FSF isn’t about design and aesthetics, right? But donate button not working demonstrates the whole seriousness of the effort.
Well… mixed feelings here. I spent a lot of time dealing with early smartphones and hacking away at Android, Tizen, FirefoxOS (remember that?) and several variations on that theme back when manufacturers were vying for differentiation, and I get that the FSF has a mission, but I don’t see this panning out.
Like many folk who’ve been watching Google’s gradual shutdown of AOSP and alignment with Apple in terms of platform lockdown, I think the days of fully open devices are actually coming to a close. Again, I applaud the FSF’s initiative, but you need to get a lot of buy-in for this kind of thing to work—-manufacturers, developers (both OS and app devs), and, of course, users, who will never accept anything that doesn’t let them do things like banking, shopping, mainstream social apps, etc.
And you can’t do a lot of those on an unlocked boot loader (which I think is going to be the logical consequence of replacing bits of the OS) without more hacking. It’s like XML and violence—-it will only lead to more of the same.
I expect the usual amount of “you can do that with web apps” pushback, but let’s be real. Except in markets like India where simpler and vastly cheaper platforms make sense, you either use iOS, Android, or… nothing but voice calls, and I don’t see enough here to make me think this will be something for everyone.
And this is not even always possible. In Ukraine, government app is released as an app, not a web service. Same goes for banking app. You just can't do these things from other devices, you must have (mainstream) Android or Apple phone.
I've been looking into projects like GrapheneOS for a while now, but it is just impossible to use in Ukraine.
Genuinely curious: why can't you use GrapheneOS in Ukraine? Most Android apps work perfectly. In my case, the only ones that don't are the ones made by lazy developers who rely on location data that I deny. They claim to work without it, but obviously never tested.
Maybe I can after all! I saw on reddit people complaining about banking apps not working, so I just assumed mine would not work as well. But according to this list [1], the biggest Ukrainian banks are supported. Nice
I can't find any info on the government app though. It might not work. But still, I can actually consider GrapheneOS now.
If it's a government app, you can pressure the government in many more way than you can let's say a bank - and FSF has experience in that kind of pressure. I hope their technical initiative also comes with a parallel legal/policy initiative that tries to get governments to stop using things like attestation.
You can't boycott a bank, they all do the same shit and you need to have one.
With a government, however, you can go through your MPs, use administrative procedures to lodge complaints, etc. They also don't have Visa/Mastercard forcing them into attestation, it's usually just because the contractor thought it made things More Secure™.
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. So to me it's the lack of digital sovereignty from the EU and our individual countries that is the main issue. Sure it would be nice if big tech didn't close their platforms, but that ship appears to have sailed. If they ever get around to making these apps available through a different store, then I don't see why I wouldn't want a different OS.
We still need open hardware and more companies like fairphone to utilize it, but we primarily need the EU to get it's act together and break the reliance on big tech app stores. I know there are a few companies trying to build app stores with the necessary security compliance and if the EU wants to be serious about digital sovereignty it'll need to support these.
> 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 themselves.
GrapheneOS supports Google Play (it ships with an app that lets you install it in one click), it does NOT give you root access, and it goes through the extra effort of implementing the obscure security features that banking apps require. I won't say 100%, but maybe 99% of apps on Google Play will work on Graphene, including banking apps. This compatibility, along with the added security and privacy features are why it's such a big deal. It's not just hype around the latest shiny custom ROM.
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 compatibility, and especially the fact that they just got RCS messaging working. But any time Google or even an app vendor wants to tighten the noose, they can, just by requiring the higher, hardware-backed attestation level.
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.
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:
> you are swapping Google Android for GrapheneOS Android
No? You're adding support for Graphene's keys, not replacing Google's. Obviously, the main barrier is convincing developers of these apps to add support for Graphene's keys. However, this is only a problem for apps that opted to implement the Play Integrity API at all, which doesn't seem to be very common. All the recent monopoly rulings against Google may be deterring devs from implementing this obviously anti-competitive feature, and that's not to mention Google's new responsibility to offer the Play store app catalog to competing stores, thanks to the Epic case.
> The injunction issued last year by U.S. District Judge James Donato requires Google to allow users to download rival app stores within its Play store and make Play's app catalog available to competitors. Those provisions do not take effect until July 2026.
My point was that this situation doesn't allow for Software Freedom, since you the user cannot control the OS, its an unmodifiable blob unless you are either someone with a blessed key (like Google, or GrapheneOS devs), or are willing and able to to go without the apps that use the attestation APIs, or have one locked down device for attestation apps and a separate one that you can actually control. Probably the only way to deal with that is make attestation to third parties illegal, I assume governments and banks would get exempted from such laws though.
Android has a hardware attestation API that is compatible with GrapheneOS (if the app accepts GOS's keys), but nobody uses it. Everyone uses the Play Integrity API; GrapheneOS can't pass the "strong" (hardware-backed) level of Play Integrity, though it passes the weaker ones.
The Dutch electronic identification app, DigiD, uses the Android-native attestation API.
Also good to make a distinction between the different things you can do in an attestation procedure: bootloader/boot integrity checks, attest a specific key, and ID (imei etc) attestation.
However, I still stand by the idea of having options. Many of us in developed Countries are likely to remain on our IPhones or Androids, but there is still a chance for FSF to shine in other areas.
Also, as someone who was a FirefoxOS user (I think around 2011-2016) I am always open to replacing my Android with FREE (as in freedom) alternatives.
As I mentions in previous comments - the main "fight" is convenience vs freedom.
Either we have the convenience of being able to do things on our devices with little effort of all (with variations of lockdowns and/or less control)... or we run something that respects your freedoms but some things require a few more seconds/minutes to do.
Personally, I would choose the latter. However, I know I am the minority in the world of phones.
Don't get me wrong. I am not some freedom(software) fighter. I accept that there is a convenience I need on phones today. In the workplace, I need MS Teams. If I don't have this, my Company will have to offer me a Work phone. Other than this, I do use it for banking, map navigation, etc. However, these are not deal breakers for me.
Also, we have the convenience with AI, which more and more will adapt like a special friend, will make things ever harder in the freedom world. Be interesting to see how this evolves.
At the end of the day - things change. It's hard to think like this but we don't know what we will be using in the next 10 years. Maybe in this universe, Microsoft Windows might still be king in the OS world. However, in another Universe Microsoft ends up making too many poor decisions even businesses are open to alternatives.
It's the same thing for smart devices. Apple might make a STUPID decision in the next 10 years. Although we still have Android variants on the market, the Librephone might get a big push by ex-Apple users.
We shall see. If this project does well and can do certain types of "convenience" then I would be willing to try it!
It is always a pleasure to have something with convenience but does not cost my freedom.
> ..users, who will never accept anything that doesn’t let them do things like banking, shopping, mainstream social apps, etc.
Plenty of users are now buying feature phones that don't come with these features. Think of a libre phone as a uniquely user-focused, distraction-free device that still allows for a core smartphone/PDA compute featureset.
The hardware was a little difficult to obtain in the US, and WiFi worked only with a blob of questionable provenance.
It looks like Replicant has been stuck for several years, and they recognize that they need to find a new device, funding, etc.
(After Replicant, I spent some time on PostmarketOS with various devices, and then gave up and bought iPhones, and then got ticked off and moved to GrapheneOS.)
I wonder whether the FSF is already collaborating with Purism on this, to leverage their work on the Librem 5 and PureOS, which I believe the FSF is well aware of. If the FSF manages to muster a lot more open source volunteers on a more affordable hardware, but that work is also usable for Librem 5, then it could be a win-win. (And Purism also has something called Liberty Phone, which is a made-in-USA Librem 5 phone, so their lawyers should talk about trademarks in any case.)
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 project had eyed it as a target device [2].
That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.
You make it sound like the Redpine card ended up being shitty because of RYF efforts. The Redpine card was chosen because of its internal flash, but the fact that the vendor failed to properly support the advertised features (and even removed some that worked before), abandoned its mainline driver and pretty much halted the firmware development after SiLabs acquisition is orthogonal to that and could have happened with a different card as well. So nice it was a replaceable M.2 card, isn't it? ;)
> Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.
The LineageOS folks are working on supporting their OS on Linux-first devices running a close-to-mainline (not AOSP) kernel. So it could go either way. Of course if they do choose an Android-first device, their efforts would ultimately also make it easier to run a mainline kernel on it as shown by projects like pmOS.
> That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.
Is there any actually relevant alternative to this oligopoly? Apple doesn't sell to third parties, NVDA lacks a baseband and so does (to my knowledge) Broadcom, and it's been ages since I saw anything from Intel in the mobile space.
> If the FSF manages to muster a lot more open source volunteers
First line of my pitch is, "When hundreds of millions of people need something, it doesn't make sense to wait for a handful of volunteers to build it for free."
That's their US made patriot phone, the regular less than half of that. Also, please read up on the concept of economies of scale.
If you go with postmarketOS (good!), and don't want to touch anything that touched Purism, better avoid anything GTK (Phosh, GNOME Mobile and related apps). While Purism did not make a competitive phone, their investments into libre software went great and keep paying off.
no i wont. it is literally that simple. the regular device has 3 gb of ram. the flagship has 4gb for 4k and released 4 years ago. also yeah i do try to avoid anything gtk but not for any particular reason. i just prefer qt.
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 is where I feel they could truly make the biggest difference for freedom for the average user.
A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there. If the OS is tightly controlled, we have no recourse.
Even in the worst case scenario, we could use a cheap big-tech-approved phone for these applications (a glorified digital token) and use the free phone for everything else. When there's enough adoption and trust in the new phone, non-technical avenues are available to influence these organizations to accept the alternative.
I've kinda migrated to the worst-case scenario already and it's really not that bad - for my use case.
I have an old phone (actually running LineageOS rather than stock) that works as you perfectly describe as a glorified digital token. This device doesn't come with me. There's no banking I need to do, on a day-to-day basis, requiring said token, that has to be done right now or the world will end. It can wait until I get home (and I usually use the bank's web interface from a desktop). This device has minimal other apps installed, which limits bank app accessibility of other app data, and other app accessibility of bank data.
Then my GrapheneOS daily driver serves my day-to-day needs with minimal data leakage, tracking, ads, other general paranoia-inducing modern-life shit.
I pay for things on a day-to-day basis with a physical debit card due to an existing habit of not wanting to depending on a single device for "all the things", so GrapeheneOS wasn't a downgrade, but it should be noted to others that whilst Google Wallet can run on GrapheneOS, NFC payments through the Google Wallet will not work due to Full SafetyNet requirements that GrapheneOS can not pass. Non-NFC items such as tickets and boarding passes have been reported to work (and I'm pretty sure I've used it for that, although Google Wallet is no longer installed on my device).
That is a slight concern, but I don't see it happening, at least in Australia for the big four banks, in the near future.
If that became the case, then the 'glorified token device' would become the dedicated banking device, and not much else would change (ie. I still wouldn't be doing 'banking' while I'm out and about).
I hadn't migrated my life to any of the (tiny, possibly zero) convenience improvements that "mobile banking" may offer me, so none of what I've described has been any kind of downgrade in 'living'.
(I don't mean this in a sarcastic way) are you able to make tangible what 'living' I may be sacrificing?
Having a separate phone as a "glorified digital token" is probably within the top 3 things you want to do anyway if you are serious about digital security.
Also, if your bank uses SMS for verification then the phone should have its own phone number which you keep secret. Otherwise it's one data leak and one sim swap attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_swap_scam) from breaking your SMS verification.
> A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there.
Not if they require something like hardware-backed remote attestation, and only accept such attestation from Google or Apple.
I'd love a practical Linux phone, and being able to run a deblobbed close-to-mainline kernel on a new-ish phone would help with that, but that doesn't really solve the most user-facing problem of mobile phones, the ecosystem lockdown.
You can trust hardware and software that's easy to inspect.
If you can't be sure what's going on and unable to inspect or debug the hardware and software, how can you trust it's doing what you want?
Proprietary hardware and software is already known to work against the interests of the user. Not knowing exactly what's going on is being taken advantage of at large scale.
Let's put it this way: if you can choose between making your own lasagna with a good recipe vs ready-made microwave lasagna. What would you choose? How about your suit? And would you trust an open known to work well pacemaker vs the latest Motorola or Samsung pacemaker? Would you rather verify the device independently or pay up for an SLA?
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 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 files? So what if apps could use that to leak user location data, I need that ability so I can tell if it's a picture of a bird"
For sensitive information - such as financial transactions - the rewards for bad actors are simply too high to trust any device which has been rooted. The banks - who are generally on the hook if something goes wrong, or at least have to pay a lot of lawyers to get off the hook - are not interested in moral arguments, they want a risk-reduced environment or no app for you - as is their right.
> For sensitive information - such as financial transactions - the rewards for bad actors are simply too high to trust any device which has been rooted
In practice, that just means you trust a Chinese black box Android ROM from a random manufacturer, but not a fresh Lineage OS. To run some banking apps there, one has to root it and install all kinds of crap to hide the fact that your phone is running an OS you actually can trust.
I don't think it's right, I don't think non-manufacturer provided ROMs are a real danger in practice, or rooted phones, and I think this is all just security theater and an excuse to control what people do on their own devices.
> The banks - who are generally on the hook if something goes wrong, or at least have to pay a lot of lawyers to get off the hook - are not interested in moral arguments, they want a risk-reduced environment or no app for you - as is their right.
If they pay for the phone and ship it to you then I agree. Otherwise, they have an obligation to serve their community (part of their banking charter) and that may include meeting their customers where they are, rather than offering an app with unreasonable usage requirements.
No charter requires allowing access from any device. The charters don't even require banks to be open during hours most of their customers are off work.
> 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 files? So what if apps could use that to leak user location data, I need that ability so I can tell if it's a picture of a bird"
Well, no. The objection isn't to sandboxing apps, but to sandboxing the user, as it were. On my laptop, I run my browser in a sandbox (eg. bubblewrap, though the implementation of choice shifts with time), but as the user I control that sandbox. Likewise, on my phone, I'm still quite happy that my apps have to ask for assorted permissions; it's just that I should be able to give permission to read my photos if I choose.
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.
That's not a good example. My bank issued a token device which scans their code, asks me my pin, prompts me what's going to happen and asks for confirmation. Then I can enter the digits to proceed.
This is reasonably secure. If you hijack my account, you still don't have the hardware device and the random secret that was set up between the device and the bank.
You need to actually hack into the bank itself to transfer my money elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I only access the bank with my own computers. That means I installed them and have root. Not a problem at all.
The threat models aren't secret algorithms, they're apps reading the contents of the screen, stealing keystrokes, MITM attacks against 2FA, and much more.
I don't have this problem on my computers, they run free software. My wifes thinkpad runs free software. The friends I gave a computer with various GNU+Linux distros don't have this problem.
Add Google Chrome with its spammy extensions to the mix and they start getting problems.
So, things that can be exploited on a stock Pixel with no user root? This is a weird argument to make at the same time as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588594 is on the front page.
There’s no way I’d trust open source anyone with my health. And I am not sure there is one open known to work well project, let alone a pacemaker that couldn’t possibly be funded in the open source world. What open source hardware is actually more usable than the closed source alternative for most people?
Should the app builder’s ability to “trust” that the hardware will protect them from the user supersede the user’s ability to be able to trust that the hardware will protect them from the app?
In other words, should the device be responsible to enforcing DRM (and more) against its owner?
There is one solution to this problem that many people reading this message can contribute to:
Make sure your app has a progressive web app version that has feature parity with the store apps. That way, the app will work on phones like the librephone, and, if Apple or Google decide to kick you off the store, you and your users have some recourse. As a bonus, it’s compatible with open source — users can modify the app and install it without jailbreaks, root or (for now) sideloading.
React Native supports this (and can mostly be bundled with electron for mac/win/linux support).
You are mixed up 3 different tech stacks:
1. React Native has nothing in common with web apps except JS runtime. It uses "native" widgets for Android and iOS. You need to add a new "native" runtime for your free OS. There are some third-party attempts to add mac/win/linux support, but they are not feature complete as officially supported platforms. Again, your free OS will be step behind.
2. Yes, you can write PWA with React (Web), but PWA still have many missing features which offered by platform APIs of Android and iOS. Your app will not be in "feature parity" with "native" app. Especially banking app.
3. Electron apps are integrated with desktop platform APIs, you cannot easily port Electron app to mobile.
Every time big company with big investments wins.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good "Remote Attestation 101" tutorial? I'm trying to wrap my head around why someone couldn't just run an Android emulator to run your banking app or whatever. I mean there then must be hardware keys that are not present in the code, but then there must be a revocation method for compromised hardware keys, etc..
I have a react native app, and can compile it to pwa mode. It runs well in a browser.
99% of the code runs fine in electron to. Index.tsx is the main exception.
I’m not saying you can automatically run software for one of these targets across all three. I’m saying it’s straightforward to write portable software that works on all of them.
Also, I can’t think of any apps I use that require any platform-specific APIs at this point. Even if they did, the phone I want would be able to surface those APIs to pwas.
It won't just be them. I foresee Cloudflare and other CDNs offering a free checkbox: [] Require age of majority verified user
And it will in turn depend on Secure Attestation, Web Credentials, and other recent W3C work to provide proof that you're the registered owner, age of majority and verified by thumbprint or other biometrics, running an unmodified device. Your ID might be escrowed with your OS vendor, email provider, bank, ISP, or even Twitter/X, who knows. Either way, as an end user you'll be mollified that you don't have to provide your ID to the adult site, and the adult site will be happy that they don't have to implement any of this themselves.
And, of course, this will mean that an intelligence service could have ironclad proof of exactly what person visits what website, effectively killing a lot of online anonymity.
I agree, but unfortunately I think the chances of that are just about zero. The reality is that the vast, vast majority of people don't care about software freedom. They care about the flashy marketing features in the newest iPhone (and competitors). I wish it were otherwise, but alas. Heck, you can't even get people to care about their physical freedom most of the time, let alone their digital life. It's hard to see this effort taking off as a result.
These days browsers are becoming increasingly distrusted. My bank logs my browser out after 30 minutes inactivity and then to log back in I have to confirm the login on my phone.
That… seems reasonable? My bank does that with their website and their mobile app. I was able to setup 2fa using a totp app, so i don’t rely on sms for that part
It is given the environment. But it does highlight the poor security of desktop browsers where they are only trusted to do anything when a phone app approves it. While the phone app is considered secure enough to just stay logged in perpetually without any external confirmation.
To hack the banks app you have to find an exploit in iOS or Android which would allow you to read the other apps private storage, which is borderline impossible now. To hack the banks website you just have to buy some random browser extension and add malware to it, or break into someones NPM account and distribute it there, or any number of ways to run code on someone else's computer. Something very achievable by an individual.
> But it does highlight the poor security of desktop browsers where they are only trusted to do anything when a phone app approves it.
Does it? The browser doesn't do anything, the person sitting at the computer where the browser is running is what performs the actions. The reauthentication and 2fa is meant to authenticate and authorize the user, not the browser.
The attack vector of someone else using your phone using an app that doesn't require (re)authentication is independent of the browser or the app itself being trusted. That your bank doesn't periodically require some kind of re-authentication for their app is a security hole, but because the device could fall into the wrong hands, not because the code/app/browser used to access it isn't trusted.
That is true. I guess one of the main differences is the bank app can run a faceid check when you open the app and before you make a transaction while websites don't have access to these apis. So they are forced to make you approve the action via your phone.
Every banking phone app I've used auto-logouts after being idle or unused for a bit, and my primary bank's app requires 2fa using an app that exists on the same device -- a second factor that secures nothing. They probably are not explicitly considering the phone more secure than a computer, but rather a good 80% of this is security theater or a checkbox on some baseline security checklist that was implemented without really understanding what the implications, for usability and security, were going to be.
> 2fa using an app that exists on the same device -- a second factor that secures nothing
2FA on the same device secures against your login credentials becoming known to another party, e.g. by fishing, password reuse, database leaks, etc., which are real threats. It is not meant to protect against someone being in possession or full control of your unlocked device, which is of course also a real threat, though possibly less common.
> 2fa using an app that exists on the same device -- a second factor that secures nothing
If I steal your device, and you didn’t have faceid, I have both factors. But if I steal your password, or find it in a leak of another site because like most people you re-use passwords, then I only have one factor. It still provides a fair bit of security because of that.
This isn't the browser not being trusted, it's access to the device the browser runs on. Forcing logout when idle, and authenticating again, is good in general to avoid leaving something accessible when walking away from it, even if it's a home computer that is otherwise "secured".
webauthn cares about the strength of the authenticators used. Mobile has standard libraries for biometrics and secure enclaves. This is less common on desktops and laptops. Your bank may offer the ability to enroll a yubikey or similar.
I took "tap to pay" being clicking on Order in an app; and I have certainly made a "online order" from inside the Chipotle, on their wifi with my laptop (usually because walking to the counter would cost more because of stupid promotions).
It makes more sense that they're referring to Apple Pay or similar shenanigans (which itself is more annoying than a credit card, to be honest, Face ID goes wrong or the double click closes the wallet app instead of authenticating way too many times, especially if you're trying to do it one-handed).
You seem to be part of the problem. As long as people like you are happy to run spyware on their phones for the sake of convenience or a meager discount, companies will be empowered to make such software and devices a requirement.
I use cash whenever possible, but carrying cash for larger transactions has its own risks and those risks need to be balanced against the privacy benefits it offers. The way I see it, carrying a credit card in addition to my phone when I might need it is a minor inconvenience relative to that of allowing Google complete control over my phone.
My bank doesn't let me do anything in the browser without 2FA, and the only 2FA they offer is their smartphone app.
My other bank offers 2FA via chip reader as an alternative. I guess that's somewhat viable for an alternative phone OS, if you want to carry the reader around with you
In my country we have a large religious community that eschews smartphones. Due to this no company or government agency requires a smartphone for service.
This is a very good thing. I don't think many people here on HN reject technology, but sometimes no technology is better than one that is not controlled by the user.
It's because it's way easier to install malware on PC than mobile. None of us are immune either. In recent times there has been malware distributed by common NPM packages as well as game mods. Every NPM package you install has the ability to steal your browser session tokens and the only thing stopping the attacker from actually logging in and spending your money is the fact it has to be confirmed on your phone.
Depends on the bank's policies. Currently it tends to be when you transfer to a new destination and/or above a certain amount. I could certainly imagine a bank requiring it for every PC-initiated transaction as and when they reach a point where most normie customers are using their app.
> What type are transactions are you talking about?
Bank transfers and I guess direct debit authorisations (if your bank requires you to confirm those) and reauthorisation/confirmation of card payments that were blocked by the bank's fraud detection. I think those are the only kinds of transactions one would ever use a PC for? I mean for me most of my day-to-day transactions are me paying by debit card in a shop, but you can't do that on a PC in the first place; pretty much everything else I do on my PC.
No. Only to unblock when they get blocked/flagged as fraud (tends to happen for large transactions like plane tickets or buying a bunch of furniture), and even then I currently have the option of authorizing via the web browser (and I think also via phone call).
But sending a bank transfer is also a fairly common day-to-day transaction that I do a couple of times a month (and is the only way to pay for some government services like tax certificates short of visiting the tax office in person). Authorising a new direct debit happens occasionally (joined a gym, changed my utility provider, got a new credit card, that kind of thing).
My brokerages require it every time I login from a computer. My bank will require it if it can't find a cookie from a previous login session. Occasionally, my bank will require it seemingly randomly since I usually log in at least once a week from my laptop yet every couple of months or so I have to reconfirm on the app or another secondary method.
AFAIK Zelle is something US banks got together and set up on their own because the government didn't. So a Zelle transfer is the US equivalent of a SEPA transfer.
Indeed, binary blobs are not much of a problem; it's anti-user "security" that has to be attacked. Otherwise we'll end up with user-hostile systems that we can see the source code of but can't modify, in contrast to systems that we can't see the source code of but can modify. The Windows modding scene of the late 90s/early 2000s is a good example of the latter (and I've joked that every power user was a novice reverse-engineer), while Android is turning out to be a good example of the former.
Stallman had a good idea for free (as in freedom) software, but then "missed the forest for the trees" by focusing on the source code.
> 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?
What does it matter if you can use any OS you want if your phone is filled with SoCs which are bugged and backdoored by the state and/or who knows who else? The reality is that we need both free hardware and free software. I can always tell my bank to fuck off and move my accounts to one that gives me freedom to use the mobile OS of my choosing, and if there isn't a single bank on earth willing to do that I can always simply refuse to use my cell phone for banking.
I'd much rather keep the phone I control and trust while limiting myself to only having the options of a desktop PC, a laptop, an ATM, a phone call, a drive thru, and walking into my bank's closest branch when interacting with my bank. Not being able to also stab my finger at a cell phone screen to check my balance isn't really that big of a deal.
> What does it matter if you can use any OS you want if your phone is filled with SoCs which are bugged and backdoored by the state and/or who knows who else?
Perhaps. But how does this effort from the FSF do anything to solve that? They are (as far as I can tell) producing firmware, not hardware. If the hardware manufacturers are working with the government or whomever to spy on you, they will just not use the FSF firmware in that case.
Well you're partially right. After all, the "big tech approved phone OS" is actually Linux, so just having a free OS isn't enough to prevent it from being co-opted and turned into a locked-down platform.
But the partially wrong part is, we can make our own platform. PCs let you install and run any software you want, because it's an open platform. If we make an open platform smartphone that can compete on features with the closed behemoths, and that then becomes popular enough, then banks may offer apps on that.
But this is tricky too. Linux already has issues getting official support from corporations. We'd need our open platform to be compatible with the closed ones, so that it's easy for banks to run their apps on our open platform. There are already ways around this, like virtual machines to run Android, or other methods. But the closed behemoths may try and end-run around this, like DRM. So we'll still need to advocate for our rights and compatibility.
Get a big tech second phone. Cheapest available. Just perform the needed tasks and use your Libre phone for everything else.
Does anyone remember having a copy of internet explorer that the bank required (or chrome these days) but using firefox for everything else? Apply that concept to a phone.
For people without a viable alternative such as transferring their funds to a bank that does not require Google/Apple certified devices, this seems to be the way. The second phone does not even need to have a SIM card in it, except perhaps during set up. That phone does not leave home and is ideally be powered off with its battery removed when not in use. Everything else can be done on a free device, ideally using FOSS apps. Ideally again, this means no Facebook, no Whatsapp, no IoT crapware.
Luckily, here in the U.S. this is still possible. I run Graphene on a Pixel without Play Store compatibility layer and everything just works. Most of my apps come from F-Droid, with the notable exception of Whatsapp, for which a standalone APK is available. Unfortunately, it is proving difficult to get rid of Whatsapp entirely because of friends and family.
Yup. Right now that's something running graphene for me. I'd prefer full linux but the other options don't seem viable yet to me. When I tried the pine phone a few years ago its battery life was in the 3-5 hours range if I used the phone which is not sufficient.
Some banking apps require relatively new OS, so if you have an old phone with e.g. Android 8 and you can't upgrade (Android 9 removes certain important features), you are out of luck.
But then I would need to constantly charge two phones and keep two phones in my pocket all the time because I never know when I would need to do those things on the go.
I recently added a second phone for secure comms (Graphene). The biggest hassle turned out to be moving data between them. For that I settled on running my own Matrix server.
> You check your banking apps multiple times each day with the frequency and unpredictability expected from messaging apps?
I almost do, yes. Life's complicated, I use several bank and credit card services a day. I'm not at home at suitable times for my banking needs. And payments for purchases sometimes require confirmation in real time via phone app.
> If not that frequently or unpredictably then you could just plan to use your laptop for banking some time during the day.
I used to do that years ago back when it was an option.. But these days, 3 banks I use (two for business) require using their mobile app to authenticate login on a laptop browser. There's no other option.
One of the card apps I have to use often won't even run when Android developer mode is enabled, which is quite annoying.
I hope all the things you mention never become mandatory some day because I currently use my phone for voice and text only. Sooner than later I plan to get rid of my phone all together. I'm gonna surprise the phone company and get a land line. That means any online service that uses SMS/text to verify me will fail.
If you're being serious, you're in for a rude awakening. POTS lines are dead and being replaced with VOIP and VoIP to pots modems on the premise. lots of cities have already started to grub the copper out and replaced it a long time ago with fiber.
I get what you are saying but POTS in my location is still copper. I know because I dug it up when putting in a cattle guard. I will have to splice it back together and run it somewhere other than under my driveway which I had paved. 811 marked it as disco/not-in-use. The telco accidentally leaked their plans to run fiber everywhere so I might wait for them to do that. If it ends up being VoIP then maybe I would still have SMS capability for poor mans 2FA? Maybe the competition will drive the cost of my existing fiber down. To userbinator's point the end result will be no more options to install applications. It would just be a phone. I would be back to good old fashioned NSA voice monitoring.
Exactly. A simple phone that runs a browser I can trust that's also capable of running web-based apps is all I need. I already avoid running apps on my iphone whenever possible.
The phone I really want is as uncomplicated and open as possible and beholden to no corporate economic interests or privacy invasions.
Now that I'm retired I'm looking for a project to immerse myself in. This sounds like just the ticket.
It depends on what definition of "uncomplicated" you'll assume, but that's pretty much how I perceive my Librem 5. It's fairly inspectable and relatively easy to understand as a computing device - no weird stuff like hundreds of disk partitions that you can't touch without risking bricking the phone like on Qualcomm devices, but a fairly regular GNU/Linux installation with well-defined boundaries on what's open and what's not - and it runs web apps pretty well. I have things like my bank, public transit planner, ride-hailing, webmail, RSS reader, Matrix client, package delivery status, even Facebook & Messenger for the handful of people that can still be only reached there - all "installed" as web apps using Epiphany (aka GNOME Web). Some of them required a bit of fiddling to discover which user-agent leads to a usable experience, but the results have been pretty good so far. In case I really need to run some Android app for some reason, I can boot Waydroid up and launch it there, though I use it very rarely. No corporate economic interests, no privacy invasions, no invasive notifications or ads, it simply works the way I want it to work. I just have to be careful with battery usage, but it's manageable :)
Actually "open" is a misnomer, maybe it was a decade ago but it's clear that Big G has an effective monopoly over browser(s), the web "standards", and is gradually making them more user-hostile.
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 me day by day, the primary reason I don't switch to Chrome is because it just doesn't integrate with macOS at all.
Also, rather than restore the previous state when I swipe to go back, it has to reload the page from scratch
I've encountered cases when both behaviours would've been desired (either use the cached version, or the latest version), so I think that's neither a point in favour nor against.
Well, Safari caches resources, it just doesn't seem to cache the actual runtime state of the page like Chrome does (look for bfcache). The bfcache article claims Safari and Firefox do it too, but I have both in front of me and no they don't (or it's not good enough).
I think real caching is superior because you can manually reload if you actually needed that, but you can't go in the other direction.
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.
Something Safari does is show a stale version of the webpage while the updated version is loading. I notice because none of my pointer movements take effect until the page finishes loading again. I'm not sure if Firefox does this too.
Mozilla is absolutely asleep at the wheel (and have arguably already swerved off the road and hit a tree) and Apple aren't any better than Google in terms of wanting to lock down the web.
Yeah... Corporations and governments are starting to push remote attestation. There'll be little point to a free computer if it gets us denied service everywhere. At this point we're gonna end up marginalized, like second class citizens of society.
> There'll be little point to a free computer if it gets us denied service everywhere. At this point we're gonna end up marginalized, like second class citizens of society.
Given the apparent trajectory of the corporate/government model of organizing society, it seems like they're going to be the ones that will be second-class citizens.
The mere fact such phone exist could be enough argument for pushing back, for ex. hurtful legislations.
People tend to see current world as carved in stone, like it is not going to change. It is, still not easy but, much easier to ask government not to mandate Windows/MacOS only program for essential task, because of couple of users of other systems, rather than asking to imagine that in future there might be other systems.
Funny that bank software needs approved phone, but runs absolutely fine in the browser. That to me sounds like collusion - something that regulators should look at. There is absolutely no need for banking app to require "legitimate" Android or other operating system.
As terrible as proprietary app 2fa is, it still beats the tar out of SMS or email 2fa, security-wise. I don't get why my bank, who used to be pretty cutting edge, never implemented TOTP or passkeys...
UBS bank mandates their "Secure Access" app as second factor even when logging in from a desktop. They used to allow the smart card reader for existing customers that had it as a work around for a few years but they disabled that.
Also many websites are making it remarkably hard to not use the app if they even remotely sense you're not on an actual PC. FB and LinkedIn aren't banks but prime examples.
To be clear I'm not saying that alternatives don't exist now. But it's a worrying trend that big businesses, and even governments in some cases, are moving away from such alternatives being available. Look for example at the proposed age verification scheme in the EU, where they don't plan to make a version you can use on a desktop (and even for mobile devices require you use a vendor-attested device). Sure, right now it's just for looking at porn. But it seems to me that once that settles, it won't be long (a decade or two) before you start to see government IDs require a similar mobile app. That's the kind of thing I fear happening soon.
Monzo bank in the UK doesn't have a web access (apart from very basic page where you can block your card and do nothing else, not even see your balance).
They also retired support for older Android phones, so if you happen to use it on an old phone, you are out of banking.
I, for security, refuse to install bank apps on my phone that I carry, but I have them on a separate phone that I have in safe place.
Here in SE Asia (in my country at least) you're lucky if they even offer you SMS 2FA (and even then, only for cash withdrawal from ATMs), because otherwise its just using PIN or biometrics without any kind of second factor auth.
> are you asking if WhatsApp offers some alternative to banking services? It doesn't
Indian banks provide their full suite of services through WhatsApp. I have opened and closed accounts, completed KYC and authorised transfers through it.
This was a problem during the early 2000s when Windows and Internet Explorer were utterly dominant. Some banks, government services, and other essential websites used ActiveX controls, preventing access by non-Windows users. I remember during my senior year of high school being unable to fill out a college financial aid application circa late 2004 or early 2005 on my PC running FreeBSD and Firefox; I needed to use Windows and Internet Explorer.
I remember the stagnation of Internet Explorer combined with increased awareness of security exploits in Windows and Internet Explorer led to the rise of Mozilla Firefox and (to a lesser extent) increased marketshare for the Mac. This, combined with the arrival of smartphones around 2007, put pressure on organizations to make their Web sites accessible to a wider range of browsers instead of just IE.
Perhaps if we had a critical mass of people using phones with FOSS software, this would be enough for banks and other organizations to consider people who don’t use Apple/Google products.
The challenge, though, is getting that critical mass. Firefox benefitted from Microsoft’s fumbles in the 2000s. It’s going to be hard for a FOSS project to compete head-on against Apple and Google.
I agree that FSF and similar groups should be focusing efforts on influencing government policy at least as much as on software. The problem is that in practice, you’ll get a bunch of people who are erstwhile free software supporters, shouting back that the FSF should “stay n their lane” and stay out of politics (missing the point that in life, everything is politics).
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.
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.
i think the best solution to this would be some sort of docker-project for people to remotely access a device hooked up to a raspberry pi or something at home via adb via https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy as "natively" as possible.
I agree, and I've done similar to this for mobile banking successfully. This is the way :)
However, I expect at some point they'll insist on biometric authentication.
That'd exclude people who can't use the biometrics. But one bank (Revolut) told me that they're dropping customers who don't have a passport or driving license in the UK, for KYC reasons that they said they were required to follow, despite there being a large number of people without either.
So I expect banks to have no problem excluding <x% of people in a discriminatory way, if they can find an excuse, eventually.
I tried calling Starling Bank in the UK when my phone screen stopped working. I assumed they would have basic phone banking service.
They told me no. The only service they could provide over the phone was registering a new device to resume access to bank services via their mobile app.
Although they have a web banking service, which can he used on a desktop, that requires authentication via the mobile app too. It's not TOTP, it's their own thing.
As I needed to make a transaction, I had no choice but to buy a new phone in a hurry.to do it.
Several people suggest switching banks and credit card services, but I've found that not so easy. I have accounts with several banks (some for business), and 3 of them require use of their mobile app. Most credit card services I use also require use of their app. Some have websites that hand you over to the app at some point in the flow.
> 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?
Log in to your bank over the internet, the normal way.
You can replace the banking system. Replacing the banking system does nothing if a single tech company can brick the phones of people using the replacement, or block it from launching.
In that case, I will own a surveillance phone JUST for the government ID app, and put that into airplane mode almost all the time, except for the few times per month where I need that shitty app.
The rest of the time, I will use a free phone.
All the apps that I will not be able to use any more? Doesn't matter. I am now old and grumpy enough to realise that phones are utterly evil and actually useless. Give me a camera, Google Maps (or better a non-Google alternative), Signal and a browser, and I don't need anything else.
Banks and national id apps already work on GrapheneOS. Sometimes you just need to msg devs and ask them to use a different OS attestation method - see link 1. This battle is won already.
Sorry, but no. Device attestation is another mechanism to track and ultimately exercise control over the user. It fundamentally goes against the freedom of choice. You want me to authenticate with multiple factors? Cool.. let me tell you which method I'm already using on all my other accounts and then tell me how to register that with your service. You want to "measure" my device? Okay, I'll take my business elsewhere..
The phone is the critical root identity anchor for most of the world now. And many countries outside of the west has already made the Sim card a root identity. Additionally to make it trustworthy (think Google wallet and digital wallets and so on) to work they cannot trust the end user because effectively you the user don't own your own identity. So that's why the phone has to be proprietary - so that it's secure element can be trusted in interactions with the state-big-tech nexus. I talked about my experience with this while attempting to cross borders in SEA. https://polykey.com/blog/architecting-anti-fragile-trust-at-...
Unfortunately, even if you could completely de-blob the kernel itself (and for many chipsets, that would require a considerable amount of reverse engineering work!), smartphones bear the Curse of the Modem.
In a modern smartphone, modem is often a part of the SoC itself - and it runs some of the biggest and fattest blobs you've ever seen.
This is the big barrier here, and unfortunately, it is legally impossible to open source.
In most countries, the spectrum that cell phone carriers use is licensed to the carrier, under the condition they only connect devices that are guaranteed to comply with the requirements of using that spectrum. The end user (i.e. the person with the phone) has no license to use the spectrum. So in order to get regulatory certification, basically every modem has to be locked down so that the end user cannot operate it in a way that would violate any rules or regulations for using that spectrum.
So basically, it's illegal to have open source modem firmware. At least, as long as cell phones are operating on spectrum that isn't open for public use.
Ultimately, if you want to open source a modem, you first need to build your own cell phone network.
this is the same thing with wifi. There are different channels and transmission power rules depending on country. Something you cannot change even if you are root or build your own kernel, as it's built in to the wifi hardware (eg. raspberry pi)
Don't cbrs devices need to be part 96 certified? The spectrum might not be licensed but you still may need a certified device to legally use the spectrum. Which you could do, but that is a tall hill to climb for a FOSS enthusiast. And when you're done -- what network are you going to connect it to? A cheap SIM from the corner store is probably out of the question :)
looks like they need.
but it still gives you more possibilities compared to usual spectrum. if there is enough coverage from SAS you (or FSF) can build your own cbrs network that will have open source modem/firmware (yet, still will have to comply with part96).
there are also all kind of open source lte/cbrs projects iirc
It's a fun thought exercise, but putting "part 96 certification" at the end of my build pipeline sounds pretty expensive. And building a physical cell phone network is stupidly capital intensive. Maybe there are some interesting small scale niches that this would be useful for. But as a daily driver cell phone, I don't think we're ever gonna have an open source modem, at least not until there are significant changes to the spectrum that's in use.
Haven't there been projects trying to do this since 802.11b? I think the last time I looked one of these mash networks up, there wasn't even decent coverage in the dense city I lived in.
One of the two processors (the ARM one) in the PinePhone modem runs a proprietary Linux distro, which can be replaced by a free distro. The code on the Hexagon processor can't be replaced yet though I think.
Yeah, and it's the Hexagon mDSP that's the issue. It's basically THE modem. It has its own RTOS and runs the entire RF stack and whispers to all the other RF parts. The cores that run the Linux distro are just... there. For you to run Android on, normally.
PostmarketOS can run on some devices with almost no blobs - but there's no escaping the modem curse.
I for one am up to the idea of breaking android off Google due to the same reasons of chrome - conflict of interest since Google is an advertising company.
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 type, whose entire boot process is miserably locked down from the very start. It is like a bicycle made from Mickey Mouse logo bolts where the spanners are proprietary and not for sale. The situation is just as ludicrous.
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.
Librephone could be successful in a few ways. Outright, as a device, but also as a carrot to bring open handheld hardware to enough people to drive political change (with a small-p, the politics of society, as well as politics of the big-p kind) such that iOS and Android would have to follow suit. With actual public policy Librephone could also end up being a stick: bringing about legislation that requires computers of any kind to be able to boot software of our choosing. Right-to-repair plus plus, if you will.
With enough Librephone devices in the right hands, either the market or the law will demand that we have the same openness and freedom to use our devices the same way we do commodity x86 hardware today. The same freedom imprisoned and exploited in the core of mine and your phone, right now.
> 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 born on the 386. But Apple? They've been doing their own thing since day 1; I can easily imagine a world where IBM never existed and the iPhone is unchanged.
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.
Oh, I agree that Darwin is, especially by way of NeXTSTEP but even independently since then, significantly derived from the BSDs (IIRC mostly FreeBSD, but also a chunk of NetBSD code got used to make it). I just think that that would have happened with or without the PC being around. In some parallel universe without IBM making the PC, the unix family still prospers, probably mostly on the 68000 family instead of x86, Apple does their own thing for a while, and then those lineages converge in Darwin just like in our universe.
There is a lot of work to do to reverse the trend of increasingly locked down computing devices, particularly on mobile.
But from scanning through this press release, this seems nothing more than the FSF doubling down on their failed RYF approach, which does absolutely nothing for user freedom. In fact it's a big negative for freedom, as it ties down resources that could be spent doing something useful in doing something completely pointless like putting firmwares in ROM and adding another chip to load the firmware.
The thing is, firmwares are here to stay. And firmwares that can be stored on the filesystem and loaded by the OS during driver initialization increases flexibility and reduces BOM cost. So that's what device manufacturers are going to do, and RYF will not have any effect on that.
Meta-commentary: At least within the HN community there seems to be a strong interest in a pursuit such as this, given that this is at the top of the front page, and has been for a little while, plus the first page has simultaneously contained these two stories:
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.
OpenMoko had that more than a decade ago, there were a multitude of distros. I ran Debian with X11 and Enlightenment on it at one point. QtMoko was probably the best one for the Freerunner hardware though, much more suited to the small touchscreen.
Purism did a lot of work to build Phosh, based on Gnome, with GTK apps that had fluid layout. on a phone-size screen, the UI was suited for touch; but connect it to a screen and everything seamlessly switches to a standard Gnome UI.
i would rather see this get mainlined into Gnome, and for it to be common-practice to design desktop apps with a fluid layout that can adapt to phone screens.
I'm rooting for the web because it's all plain text technologies. And UIs live high up in the stack that one benefits from quick feedback, and also isn't forced to use a low-level language to develop them. But I suppose there can be language bindings from Python etc.
This seems pretty relevant on the heels of yesterday's popular discussion on how "Free software Hasn't Won" [0] in terms of tools available to the average consumer.
Just because pieces are open-source (or "free software") doesn't mean the autonomy and capabilities we want are necessarily present in the overall system.
If they wouldn’t have then X years later there would have been first beta release and zero apps on it except for a calculator app, a notes app, a calendar app, and maybe a mail app developed by the core developer team. The post would have definitely reached the top of hn, so that’d be a plus.
If prior "Linux phone" projects have taught me, it's that "based on desktop Linux" is a great way to have a ton of apps that install just fine, but can't meaningfully be used.
Not even just "requires a mouse/keyboard", but a lot of things of the form "assumes a reasonable screen size", ...
Android already is mobile: making it better makes sense. Linux already runs fine on it: termux and things like NOMone desktop combined with allowing virtual memory and keep apps running like some brands (Blackview, Oukitel) allow, you are there a lot of the way. Then Android desktop support (again, many brands have something already but it is now in Android mainline it seems). I use an oukitel rt7 as my main daily driver: it is rooted. It has some quirks and of course is very far from open, but things works, -ish. I would spend far more time on contributing if we had an open choice(or at least working) here that supports the 5g. On other phones/tablets, it is the fingerprint sensors, 3d face camera, but also different 'niche' auxillaries that would get far more attention if you at least can start with something that is (mostly open) and works. If we have coverage for a bunch of devices with everything working, it will be more attractive to work on other/newer ones.
With Linux, you will need, as I have seen on my pine phone, way too much focus on just basic apps which still are not good compared to their android equivalent: spending time there is not spending time on hardware support...
It makes a lot of sense to me. There's a huge amount of work that's already been put into the Android ecosystem that can be used in a free software phone.
Trying to build a non-Android Linux phone that is competitive is just not practical at this point. It would require an enormous amount of funding.
It's the right decision: Android is mostly open source and works well. Not to mention that in real life, right now, people need access to certain apps as a firm requirement.
Have you seen the attempts of past "Linux phones"? Usability, performance and usually battery life were horrible and progress was also slow.
There have been comments about the race to support recent phones. I hope that Fairphone will looked at as a target device. It would be a good cultural fit and they don't have a yearly device cycle which should also help.
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.
yes, but it's probably the quickest path to market with a reasonably certain customer satisfaction.
Doesn't stop you on working from there once that milestone is reached.. I would certainly welcome more alternatives in light of the recently announced changes from do-no-evilG
It's an incredible waste and an amazing example of how useless the FSF is today. Instead of supporting real Linux phones they're focusing on trying to degunk Android even more.
Funny, I would have used those exact words had they chosen anything BUT Android as their base.
All the other "freedom" Linux phones are failures (yes I'm sure fsflover will now chime in to but akshually). I know because I bought them all. They all have one thing in common: the software sucks.
And I don't even need apps. Just basic phone functionality (several Linux phones still can't do MMS), a web browser, and no crashes. Unfortunately no Linux phone has been able to give the to me yet. Whereas Android has been delivering for over a decade.
I think that supporting Android as a free platform is a sensible choice. Android has benefited from more than a decade of development by Google, Samsung, and others and provides a polished experience and thousands of apps people actually want to use (and many excellent FOSS options too). AOSP is already "free software" and starting from scratch with Linux would make very little sense at this point. The FSF is right to focus on what matters here, which is hardware on which to run free Android.
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 postmarketOS.
LineageOS has huge problems since the mandatory eBPF requirements of late Android versions, which postmarketOS and its upstreamed kernel drivers could fix. GrapheneOS has huge problems because of Pixel devices, which LineageOS could help with.
We need a unification of this ecosystem because each on their own is hardly surviving on their own against the megacorporations.
"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.
> I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.
It rather depends on what that 1% is.
The low-level code is what's most important to be free. If you have free firmware and drivers and operating system but then you still have to run a Windows VM or WINE for an old proprietary app, you can only have problems when running that app.
If you have opaque blobs interacting with the hardware, they can crash the whole system, expose firmware-level security vulnerabilities with persistence and the blobs are specific to a kernel version so when the vendor stops providing updates, you're stuck with an obsolete kernel version with known security vulnerabilities. If anything needs to be free software, it's that.
> 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.
Android is "open source" but then the devices are Tivoized or you run into attestation failures if you actually want to run your own version of it. GitHub literally got bought out by Microsoft. These seem like legitimate concerns.
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.
> 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.
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".
If your enemy knows your entire plan of attack in a battle you will lose. This isn't theoretical it's just a fact. It's why military organizations invest so much in intelligence. Knowing what the other guy is planning gives you a massive advantage.
You could perhaps say "Well then you shouldn't get in a war". But that isn't really under your control. If someone else decides they are in a war with you. You are in a war. It doesn't really matter whether you wanted to be in one or not.
"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.
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 "ethically pure"
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 on the desktop first?
It os definitely more open than most, thanks! I'm pretty sure it still has the masked boot rom before getting to the open bits. While the tpl and ddr are still blobs and might harbor naughtiness, people have at least figured out how to edit the blobs https://github.com/hbiyik/rkddr
U-boot for Rockchip builds it's own TPL. I'm using it right now. It can also use Rockchip's TPL, but that's optional, not the default. DDR training code is here:
> 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.
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!
You might have gotten lost on the steps involved in clean-room reverse engineering here?
>extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design
It's stage 1. Clean-room reverse engineering is about working with the nature of copyright, and classically goes roughly like this:
1. You set things up with a "contaminated" or "dirty" side team who have direct exposure to the IP in question, and a "clean" (or "virgin" is another older term) side team that are thoroughly firewalled. The clean side must only have devs who have never ever had any exposure to whatever it is you're trying to clean replicate [0].
2. The dirty side is in charge of producing a "fact sheet"/spec. That side absolutely extracts/disassembles or whatever else to get at the target, which is precisely what "contaminates" them. They are looking at copyrighted code. Then they use that research to a create a purely factual spec, which is then passed across the firewall to the clean side. This must be the only communication.
3. The clean side then uses that to write new code themselves that will handle state per the factual spec they've been given.
The reason it works is that (in the US) purely factual information cannot be copyrighted, there's no "sweat of the brow" doctrine or the like. Copyright, unlike patents, does not cover ideas or methods, it's about the creativity of the person in question. You can't copyright the mathematics of a function, of "when X input is received Y is output", or of general concepts. So if two (or more) people independently create works that happen to cover the exact same subject matter, but can prove they were fully independent, then it doesn't matter even if it happened to be literally identical (however improbable that would be). Each would have their own independent copyright on it.
So clean-room RE avoids all the legal snarls around "how close is this" in favor of the simple binary question of "did the team that wrote this RE'd code have any exposure whatsoever to copyrighted IP?" If the answer to that is "no" that's the end of any legal complaint, because by definition their output cannot be a derivative work. Software patents short circuit that, part of the many reasons they're evil, but as a practical matter the number of really fundamental hard to avoid ones is rapidly shrinking because it's 2025 and by 2005 a lot of the foundations had long since been done.
----
0: Which is not necessarily trivial to hire for, because the kind of person who has the kind of skills you need also is going to tend to enjoy hacking around and reverse engineering stuff for fun anyway increasing the chance they've managed to contaminate themselves.
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)
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).
LineageOS kernels are AOSP downstream kernels, and PostmarketOS has expressly deprecated their use. LineageOS is now working on running their system on close-to-mainline kernels, as provided by PostmarketOS and most Linux distributions.
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 engineering to get a fully open solution working. In a world with thousands of Fairphones and Pinephones, and billions of corporate smartphones, replacing the proprietary software needed to run those billions of corporate smartphones is a hell of a win for software freedom.
And are you really expecting the argument "open source loses" to be a real argument against a project by the Free Software Foundation? This is like asking a cancer charity why they don't endorse your preferred brand of cigarettes.
What the FSF is doing here isn't about maximizing your experience with your preferred custom ROM, it is about tearing down the proprietary software barriers that prevent the vast majority of smartphone users from fully owning the hardware they purchased. It fits perfectly with the FSF's goals.
> 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.
This type of semi-whataboutist comment appears at the top of most open source project announcements.
Once we live in a centrally planned utopia these projects will all be merged with each other and produce the perfect phone/operating system/smart watch.
This project is about reverse engineering the firmware blobs. It states that they do not want to create a distribution like postmarketOS or other projects do.
The listed distributions have already been created. The OP didn't suggest to create a distribution but to collaborate with existing ones not relying on the Google's OS.
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?
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.
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.
We are talking about the FSF here, not Apple. The former concentrate on the user freedom, not modern hardware or polished experience (which is a good thing).
> LineageOS has huge problems since the mandatory eBPF requirements of late Android versions
It's a mixed bag. The eBPF requirement makes it harder to support newer AOSP versions on very old downstream kernels (you now need a close-to-mainline port, like what pmOS aims to provide) but because it is a requirement, it will make it easier for newer devices to run a more up-to-date kernel starting from the available downstream sources.
You have a good point about things coming together, but open source often is a lot of design and development by committee, or interest.
Librephone appears to be taking existing linux approaches, and specifically reverse engineering the SoC blobs to be completely free. I may have mis read, but it doesn't appear they are building another android distro for android phones, as they already have done that in the past.
Just tried to learn the difference between these and it seems like:
- Graphene - For current devices only - An alternative for phones that are supported and updated by Google. Security Patches, etc.
- LineageOS - For devices while they're supported or may not be updated that often. Support can be sometime by community members.
- PostmarketOS - devices that no longer have a maintained Android version for it, can just become a linux computer. Mobile functionality doesn't necessarily.
Some phone chips overtime end up having a hardware security flaw that software can't fix.
I really enjoy using Android. Part of the issue is not all deices get timely security updates, even if they get monthly updates, the updates might be from 6 months ago. Google might release a security patch but sometimes it has to go through the device manufacturer, and maybe even the mobile company. Pixel / Android pure installs seem to improve this a bit, but it's hard to have complete trust.
> 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 to them and now do you want to blame them for the results?
The diversity of projects were not and are not the problem. The problem is people that do nothing and only criticize.
> 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 while ignoring financial interest, basically abandoning users and businesses. There are how many billion smartphone users on Earth, and the FSF expects volunteer programmers and volunteer donations recruited on one of the worst websites I have ever seen to carry the load? Give me a break.
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 can totally sell Free Software"[1], which ignores the fact that without any restrictions on distribution/copying, the fair market value of said Free Software rapidly drops to ~$0. It's not a viable business model. Companies have built alternate business models around soliciting donations, or selling support or non-free add-ons to Free software, but selling Free Software itself (at least as the FSF defines it) doesn't actually work in practice. (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.)
> 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 won't bother removing the license checks, it's easy enough to pay, and far easier than donating.
It is not XWiki SAS's only business strategy nor the one that brings the most money, but still, that's not a possibility to discard too fast.
You can also find paid open source Android apps on the Play store, and people (individuals!) will totally pay for them even if you can have them for free from F-Droid, like OsmAnd+ [2] or Conversations [3].
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 the Free Software equivalent of Microsoft or Google on donations.
That said, I think doing that with business software is a particularly interesting case because it allows low level employees to justify running a donation through the regular software purchasing process without raising too many eyebrows if they care to. I've seen a few other projects with similar models.
It's nothing like donations: people pay these extensions / apps like any other paid software. That's my point, actually.
In XWiki's case, we know it's not perceived like "I could be having it for free but I'll pay anyway because it's a nice thing to do".
We do explain that our stuff is open source to our customers though. It's a selling point.
In our case, admittedly, it helps that our target customers want our support anyway.
> before someone just undercuts you with a fork.
Absolutely, it is a risk to take into consideration. Now, maintaining a fork has costs too, and someone doing this would rely on continued maintenance and goodwill from the upstream vendor as well.
Downstream vendors actually have an incentive to keep good relationships with upstream, so they can share fixes and have some guarantee that whatever they base their business on keeps being maintained.
> 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.
The main reason Netflix is more convenient than piracy is that piracy is illegal. If The Pirate Bay was allowed to offer a $2/month unlimited movie streaming service with no legal repercussions, Netflix would be out of business.
Hey don't discount the work that various actors did to make piracy less convenient as well. VPNs and upload caps, not to mention putting all the infrastructure and ops in place to force people to use them made piracy harder than it technically needs to be.
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.
The initial sale never has and never will be the issue with non free software; in fact, they can sometimes be acquired free of charge. I get your sentiment and I agree with you that some software can indeed be proprietary without being predatory or abusive.
I think there is an issue with your definition of "user freedom". What do you mean by it?
Stallman, when defining free software, does not bother with standards or terms: he relies on his own definition of what "user freedom" means and from there states that free software is software that is not restrictive of this freedom.
Free software simply does not restrict what the user can do with a program. It is not a matter of interest. People that choose a free license when they publish something (and respect the license's terms, obviously) are voluntarily letting go of their ability to restrict the user's usage of the program.
The issue I would have with "non-predatory" or "non-abusive" non-free software is that it does not allow me to fix problems I might have with the program. But this is only a problem I have. In other contexts, maybe a user needs to send (modified or otherwise) copies to other people of the software without being able to make sure the author agrees that this transaction is ok.
Fundamentally, non-free software restricts the user's freedom, even if it fully respects what the user would want to do. Similarly, a typewriter that can only output English text would restrict your freedom to type anything beyond English text (which is not something you would care about if you only wanted to write English).
I think what GP means by "user freedom" is that the software acts in the interests of its users rather than the interests of its developers. Some proprietary software does do that, but there's an inherent conflict of interest there since the developer has a monopoly on the ability to control said software. Software that is open to user modification (which is how I would personally define Free Software) protects against this conflict somewhat by creating a free market for patches to the software, and free markets are much better at aligning with consumer interests than monopolies.
Stallman goes further than my preferred definition, insisting that Free Software must also be freely redistributable with no required payment. This cripples that very same market for patches by greatly limiting the resources available to fund it, and cripples the software itself if there's no big commercial interest backing it. The result is that Free Software is often not competitive with proprietary software, except when it does have a big commercial backer (Chromium, AOSP, etc) in which case that developer is often able to maintain a virtual monopoly on patches despite it theoretically being open to competition.
> Stallman goes further than my preferred definition, insisting that Free Software must also be freely redistributable with no required payment.
What do you mean? What would free software requiring redistribution payment look like? Say I send a copy of a free-as-in-freedom game that I may or may not have modified in some way to a friend or on a forum, should I pay its author(s) for this? How could I, for instance, commission someone to modify software if I want to change it when I don't have the skills to do so myself, in your definition of free software? I think a simpler definition, like Stallman's, is less restrictive of software modification.
Restricting how software is redistributed holds a great deal of power, especially when you remember the idea behind free software is that you get to have control over your software. Copyleft is such an example -- it is highly restrictive.
I get the financial issue one could have with free software as defined by Stallman; freeing the software you distribute is a difficult decision. Free software is advocated from the point of view of its users, who are ignorant to the difficulties one might face when developing and publishing software. If this is a decision you can make, it is kinder to your users to free the software you publish.
Side note: free software requires one to examine how they value commodities. Do you value the object itself, or the human time it took to make it?
In a world where software is thought of as free by default, developers can be paid not per copy, but per patch. I believe such a world would be better for software quality because I agree with you that competitive markets are better at aligning with consumer interests than monopolies.
I prefer /e/OS to LineageOS because it includes sensible defaults (e.g. Maps app + MicroG with location providers and signature spoofing enabled) that are a pain to set up for yourself after flashing vanilla LineageOS.
/e/ has extraordinarily poor privacy and security. Extremely delayed privacy and security patches including years of delays for kernel, driver and firmware updates or complete AOSP patches is not compatible with privacy.
/e/ rolls back privacy and security far more than LineageOS and /e/ includes their own invasive services. Murena services even send data to OpenAI without user consent.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... is a detailed post covering the lack of privacy and security of /e/ with a bunch of linked sources including other detailed posts by third party privacy and security researchers. It also touches on the lack of security of Fairphone hardware including end-of-life Linux kernel branches not getting LTS updates and delays for driver/firmware patches, but it's much worse with /e/.
You post something similar almost every time /e/OS is mentioned.
I recognize that GrapheneOS has a different threat model in mind (journalists, activists, etc.), but /e/OS is a big improvement over OEM Android for most regular people. I tend to agree with your linked article that for users happy to live in Apple's locked-down glass box, iOS is a more secure, more usable system than either Graphene or /e/OS.
/e/ isn't a safe option for regular people. It doesn't provide the most basic privacy and security patches or protections. Multiple years of important privacy and security patches being missing is terrible for a personal computer with tons of sensitive data. Replacing the stock OS on a Pixel 7 with an OS multiple years behind on important privacy/security patches and protections with different service privacy issues is not an overall privacy upgrade. /e/ has their own privacy invasive services including sending sensitive user data to third parties without consent and user tracking via unique identifiers.
/e/ claiming a voice-to-text service is private while it actually sends the audio data to OpenAI is not the approach of a privacy project. Falsely claiming the data sent to OpenAI is anonymized when it's brought up makes it worse. That's one representative example.
I didn't mention GrapheneOS in my reply above, but it's not aimed at a niche audience or specifically for people who need advanced protections as your claiming. It provides much broader app compatibility, stability and usability than /e/ despite their inaccurate claims about it. GrapheneOS is a privacy project providing both privacy protections and also security protections to avoid exploits compromising privacy. iOS is certainly far more private and secure than /e/. It's definitely less secure than GrapheneOS against remote attacks on browsers, messaging apps, etc. iOS having a more secure kernel than the current status quo of hardened Linux doesn't mean it's more secure overall.
I think your threat model is wildly backwards if you believe that average users are concerned about threats from bugs in old kernel versions. In all of your posts, you carelessly (or deliberately?) conflate privacy and security. This is the same shell game that Google themselves play in their marketing https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/google-pixel-phones/the-pix...
Your idea of a super-secure phone is a modern kernel with all the security patches running trusted, official signed Google Play spyware in a sandbox and all the apps collecting personal data in the same sandbox. There's an XKCD meme about this: https://xkcd.com/1200/ You are worrying about the printer drivers.
/e/ lacks privacy without taking exploits of unpatched security vulnerabilities into account due to having severe unpatched privacy vulnerabilities, lack of modern Android privacy protections and lack of important privacy features filling major gaps in Android privacy covered by iOS such as Contact Scopes and Storage Scopes. Some major gaps in privacy aren't covered by either Android or iOS such as a Sensors toggle, especially with how the sensors can be used to do rough recording of audio.
Taking advantage of privacy flaws in older versions of software is the norm and not treated as malware by most platforms, app stores, news sites or the public at large. Many widely used apps abuse privacy flaws in older Android versions. That happens both in the form of privacy bugs which were fixed in newer versions and weaknesses in the design addressed by newer OS versions. Only privacy patches for issues considered bugs which are assigned a High or Critical severity are backported. The severity is very subjective and they try to avoid adding a large number of backported patches since some OEMs struggle to keep up with it and adding more patches would make it harder. As an example, VPN leaks are only considered Low or Moderate severity issues by Android and don't get backported. Many other kinds of privacy issues are similarly only fixed for the latest OS releases. As another example, many important privacy improvements are not considered bug fixes at all and aren't candidates for being backported regardless of importance. Many privacy improvements require changing the APIs used by apps with new target API levels which can't be backported without breaking compatibility.
A large portion of the missing patches in /e/ we're referring to are privacy patches, not security patches. However, security patches are also needed to protect privacy. Many apps and services abuse the privacy vulnerabilities. The patches being referred to are a mix of both. A large subset are privacy patches, especially the Moderate and Low severity patches due to how they assign severity. Only certain particularly awful classes of privacy vulnerabilities can get considered High or Critical severity to be candidates for Android's backporting to older releases.
Apps exploiting security vulnerabilities to get code execution would be considered malware and is rare, but apps abusing many privacy flaws in older Android is the norm among mainstream apps. You're wrongly interpreting the regular stream of patches for vulnerabilities as only being for security issues when many are for privacy issues. With /e/, you aren't getting the bare minimum to protect privacy and security. Privacy also depends on security and is not an entirely separate thing as you're portraying it. We're not conflating them but rather they're very closely related. You're also disregarding privacy vulnerabilities and the steadily improving standard Android privacy protections.
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.
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.
A lot of functionality of newer Android releases (Android/AOSP 13 and later) rely on eBPF [1] for both interception of process insights and sandboxing of processes. eBPF in a nutshell is a way to build kernel hooks, so that you can also disallow or intercept syscalls or kernel API calls that the Apps are executing behind the scenes.
eBPF was introduced with Kernel 4.14 officially (but partly long before that). Most LineageOS supported devices still rely on older kernels, the most range being around the Kernel 4.4 or 4.9 branches, which lack that eBPF functionality. The LineageOS maintainers were backporting a lot of things already, but that's the "hardcut of now unsupported legacy devices" that people are experiencing with their old phones.
The issue here is that upstream vendors (e.g. Fairphone, actually meaning upstream Qualcomm IoT) only maintain their outdated kernel versions, and never maintain them in the sense of updating their driver code into newer kernel releases. The drivers are always stuck in an outdated state of a feature frozen kernel.
I'm just making this specific example with the Fairphone because "5 to 8 years support" isn't what most people would think it is. It means "only the really critical security patches of old stuff gets backported" and does not mean "hey we migrated our old code to a new kernel and Android version".
For example, Fairphone 1, 2, 3, 3+ are all stuck in old kernels right now (4.9 being the latest backport for the FP3+) and are essentially not updatable because of this.
I don't try to blame Fairphone here, because other manufacturers are much much worse in this regard. Fairphone and Pixel are already the "as good as it can get" for third-party ROMs case.
I mentioned postmarketOS specifically, because they're trying to fix that by upstreaming the kernel drivers, so that Linux support of those devices will stay updated with newer kernel releases (hopefully).
> only maintain their outdated kernel versions, and never maintain them in the sense of updating their driver code into newer kernel releases
Just an aside, but this is one of the major downsides of monolithic kernels, and a case where microkernels would have had more consumer friendly upsides.
I don't think Android is really using eBPF for much. Last I remember they were loath to adding more things and they've definitely locked away the ability to load arbitrary new programs because they couldn't secure the attack surface it opened up.
I'm pretty sure they said they're partnering with everybody that they possibly can. I also don't know what you mean by "just partner with postmarketOS." It's basically a project to create a fully-free Android-compatible distribution (or rather the fully-free low-level elements that would support this), and postmarketOS is not Android. I also don't have any idea why you think that they wouldn't be talking to everybody who is reverse engineering phones to get OSes on them.
I really do not understand this comment at all. I don't understand the weird judgemental tone, and I don't understand that people have reacted to it like there is content there.
I agree about postmarketOS but eOS isn't the same as Lineageos, I used both and they are pretty different. eOS wants to have its own non-Google ecosystem which is a non-goal for Lineageos
That's just the unfortunate reality of free software. Free software is anarchy, and the only people who thrive in anarchy are the ones who band into fiefdoms, who then fight amongst each other and build mutually incompatible projects (often from the very same components) which are direct substitutes to each other.
There's tons of evidence of this with stuff like linux distros, desktop environments (each one MUST have its own sanctioned file manager, video player, music player etc, god forbid some godless charlatan come along and make its own).
The price of admission into these 'tribes' is the adoption of the local creed (libraries/HIG/coding style/whatever/not speaking out against the Dear Leader/Core Principles/local purity committee). As with other such despotic organizations, incompetence and laziness is tolerated, disloyalty is not.
You're forgetting 1 tiny thing: the wjole AOSP ecosystem is running on volunteer dev time. It's much more difficult to organize and streamline vision / roadmap.
- 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.
> in terms of going out of their way to not use proprietary software.
Performative and an example of very self-defeating tactics that belie motivations other than actually accomplishing anything.
> they founded it
This is true, but it actually contributes to arguments that the FSF is full of crazies content to preach from the monastery of ascetic suffering rather than live in a world with lots of independence and strong open source.
Probably that Google is dragging their feet releasing Pixel kernel and other source code. LineageOS has many years of experience getting a working system on top of bad or incomplete sources, including getting kernel source out of vendors in the first place.
I will never use GOS as long as it requires me to buy a Pixel, on principle, because it's made by Google. It's like having to buy a Microsoft Surface in order to use Linux.
You can use an older pixel, thus not really giving money to Google, and also preventing that phone from landing in a landfill. Without all that Google and carrier excess junk on board, an older phone is fast.
You can buy a new pixel, install GrapheneOS, and laugh thinking about how you're denying the enemy the OS level tracking they wanted with that device.
No, actually, you don't. And Android is not closed source. Google's add ons are.
When you buy a used phone, it's already been bought by someone. The profit is already in Google's hands. Loads of old phones are in drawers somewhere. Once Graphene is on it, it's faster, not bloated, and you don't need Google anything.
The reason why GrapheneOS only supports the Pixels is that the other manufacturers are not trying to get their shit together and release a phone that is reasonably secure. It's not that GrapheneOS supports Google, it's just that the other manufacturers are worse than Google.
If a major manufacturer released a good smartphone that GrapheneOS could support, they would get new users from the set of people who want GrapheneOS. I would gladly buy a non-Pixel as long as it can run GrapheneOS.
Which means that in a way, if you buy a Pixel and install GrapheneOS, you give more credibility to GrapheneOS, making it more interesting for a different manufacturer to consider supporting them.
At least camera and other sensors. It looks much better than other devices, though. What I meant is that compared to Android, the average user might not want a half-baked device.
I don't like how /e/OS claims everywhere that they support all those phones, when in all my experience they just can't keep up and I end up with phones that don't receive vendor firmware updates for 1+ year.
Did you read the article? They're not creating nor choosing an operating system for the librephone project. They're looking into reverse engineering the binary firmware blobs needed to achieve a fully free software distribution on a modern device. Afaik, this work will benefit all alternative OS projects for whatever devices they succeed with.
I guess maybe a good analogy would be like trying to port coreboot to a laptop.
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."
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.
You can install postmarketOS on it (just as you can install lineageOS, etc on a Samsung galaxy, etc), but it ships with PureOS. "The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS" - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
The project is to reverse engineer proprietary blobs - so it makes sense to go where those blobs are and reverse to match the functionality that is exposed commercially instead of guessing at a subset for base implementation on a non-official OS?
> See also my other comment
It seems you are just as confused about this project as the OP, which is ironic given your name.
Why does it matter? Yes, I would prefer that FSF collaborated with PureOS directly, but collaborating with postmarketOS also seems possible. There are enough blobs in Librem 5, which don't depend on the OS.
> which is ironic given your name
Indeed I'm quite surprised about the FSF actions lately.
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 other OS.
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.
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?
I wanted to mention that back then when Mozilla announced its FirefoxOS based devices with the "ZTE Open" as a developer device, I realized how broken the ecosystem actually is. The ZTE Open wasn't actually open source and you weren't even able to compile FirefoxOS completely, and only the Gaia (UI) parts could be flashed or changed. So much for open source as a branding, it was a pretty useless device in terms of development.
I realized that there will never be a vendor that actually open sources their firmware blobs. We need better legislation or a complete rewrite of our judicative system to fix this, which realistically is never going to happen.
It's an anti-model in their business world, given how contracts and licensing works from upstream ARM or NXP or MediaTek. It doesn't matter really where the vendor sources their chips from. They all have similar NDAs and contracts and royalty fees.
That's why I was so disappointed by my Librem phone, again, because they, again, promised that the NXP related firmware blobs were open sourced, which honestly was a very overpriced lie to begin with in comparison to the Pinephone devices that were sold at self-cost.
I have no idea how the FSF could recommend Librem devices, because they are literally just as free as every next door Qualcomm or Snapdragon chipset.
> The FSF is now under the leadership of a "Bachelor of Arts degree in Media and Culture and a Master of Arts in the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image" who probably hasn't written a line of code.
This is an exceptionally poor argument.
1. Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
2. Your "probably" here is too big of an assumption and of not much consequence. I have a degree in humanities, do not work in IT and have contributed code to Free Software.
3. You somehow imply that formal education affects _leadership_ in a _rights_ organization and a technical one would be preferable. That's a long shot.
Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following, you're providing a counterexample.
> Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
Programmers understand software ecosystems, of which free software is just a subset. I also see a lot of programmers advocating leaderships and other non-technical skills generally. If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
> Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following
The FSF has circular logic all throughout their ideology. They only want to argue if you let them frame the conversation with their own conclusions along with a full deconstruction of views they didn't come up with, like open source, which they explicitly work to discredit and do not represent. It is little wonder that their following is not wide nor strong because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity. They are eclipsed by the EFF and several other organizations built around open source applications in terms of fund raising at this point. Don't listen to me. Just go look at some financials. You'll see how little they represent these days.
Some do, some don't and happily (or begrudgingly but willingly) contribute to building a hostile larger ecosystem.
> …of which free software is just a subset.
We're mostly talking about the movement here, but OK. Don't see what's your point here.
> If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
Of course, self-interest. Mostly the need to minimize work/pay and improve hiring or promotional perspectives.
> ...because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity
That's a great argument as it applies equally to uncommunicative, autocratic, self-absorbed, deceptive entities as well as to principled, unswayed and self-consistent ones.
I'm not arguing FSF is a pinnacle of leadership, au contraire.
This probably explains a lot of the problem then. IME those who are good at writing code are pretty bad at the social parts of running an organization.
This isn't a dig, I've known and admired quite a few people who were absolute geniuses at hardware and/OR software, real engineers but they couldn't even manage a group lunch. It's just an entirely different skillset.
Like OpenBSD Theo de Raadt who was know to be quite toxic. But in the end its project is still going and highly praised after 30 years.
Let me frame it another way:
Software is like soccer, big tech is the FIFA, free software is you amateur football team.
- The FIFA will always tell you they love amateur soccer.
- The FIFA can be run by MBA, manager but your local group of friend/team cannot.
- Someone (probably the FIFA) is telling you your local team need the manager types for you to play soccer with others.
- If an overweight man who never played soccer come to invite you to play soccer in the weekend for free you might not go. If Pele come you will go.
- If an overweight man who never played soccer offer you a job at FIFA you will probably accept because you love soccer and for the money.
- The FIFA is more interested in people watching TV and ads on Sunday than people playing soccer outside. Ultimately they want you to love soccer but it need to be their way. And their way is watching TV and buying their jersey.
This is probably why Theo de Raadt might be a big A-Hole and said no to the FIFA but he is a good player and still have a fit team having fun outside every Sunday.
I wouldn't have bet on this outcome 20 years ago.
All those open source now corrupted foundations with the beautiful websites and the big titles and leadership pages pretend to be something they are not.
Spoken like someone who has zero experience developing open source software.
I work for a company that makes a very popular open source product. The users lead our development, not the coders. Hell, I don't even code, and I get to tell the engineers what to fix based on what our users complain about.
I suppose if you think of free software as a bunch of solo-coded GitHub projects, it can feel like the coders are king, but you absolutely don't maintain a project like Linux, or any of the major distros thereof, by giving coders supreme authority over decision-making...
The whole purpose of the Free Software movement, expressed in the GPL, is to protect the rights of end users above all others - even above the rights of the people creating the software in the first place and contributing to it.
A great deal of free software is developed by employees. Except in the most reductive sense (the employees could all quit) the decisions are made by the employers.
In this instance John Gilmore is funding the work. He's not doing it himself.
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 to support them: attack decisions, not résumés or gender.
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.
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.
Feminine? What on earth? How can an NGO have a gender? And more importantly, why does it need one? I like your comment, but the word "feminine" is really sexist, as if everything female was of less value.
people followed Stallman because the GNU stuff was interesting and good, then we got decades of endless dick-measuring about whose freedom is more free, GPL2 or GPL3 or MIT or AGPL or ...
and while the differences have consequences in the grand scheme of things what mattered is what the trillion dollar corporations wanted, because the FSF didn't manage to do shit, not even the feminine coordination (nor the masculine rallying cry to arms!)
The GNU stuff was precisely what FSF managed to do. They didn't manage to do more because they had a fraction of the resources large corporations had. People wanting more just doesn't create more by itself, they were reliant on our contributions and we failed them.
Today, I have access to quality tools on my computer and my computer runs Linux without any of the drama that proprietary equivalents bring and looks visually fantastic. My computer feels mine again and for that, I remain eternally grateful to the FSF.
that we failed them might be true, but mostly they did their things and the times changed, and lots of those things are not what users want/need, so the FSF/GNU got almost completely weightless.
... it seems to me that Stallman and the FSF got complacent by their relative (and out of my ignorance I'm now assuming that also unexpected) success, and also they completely misunderstood their value proposition, ie. the product, it was not gcc, emacs, or Hurd or whatever, it was the innovation to allow and foster technical public capital accumulation. (and still, it's absolutely a not solved problem to this day. the wheel is reinvented too fucking many times, even in software.)
... of course they do deserve credit, gratitude and a lot of respect and support for their integrity and steadfastness!
It is how the times are nowadays. You don't get the CEO throne of any org without chest-thumping your social justice initiatives. The FSF is merely following fully up2date standard operational procedures of Western civilization. How can you blame them for following the de-facto standards ?
Praise the Heavens that at-least 3/10 staff are coders. That is a far better ratio than most NGOs.
It's time you stop blaming social justice initiatives for your own failures. The projection is clear.
It's wonderful that you've been privileged enough to not need to understand the point of "social justice", but it's not a bogeyman preventing you from being a leader.
the smart strategy is to put effort into projects that have a fork failsafe option
and concentrate effort on the components that don't have this (ie. drivers, hardware, codecs, whatever), but instead what we got is 20 more years GnomeJS and whatnot.
FSF could finally take a look at webOS / Open WebOS and release it for devices.
Apps built in HTML/JS/CSS, straight from 2009.
The feminine vibe doesn't really land, and seems to kind of undermine the rest of what you're trying to say.
There's no shortages of OSS floating around with individuals butting heads about splitting hairs to their preferred interpretation, forking away into oblivion or to a standstill alone.
> Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
With this:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
Yes - why are these adjectives even coming up at all? There are alternatives that would probably make your point in a succinct manner without being sexist.
Yeah I think it’s fair to say that in many circumstances people would use masculine as a pejorative and not get called out for being sexist. There’s some historic power imbalance stuff at play there, but it’s still sexist.
If you have problems with some type of behaviour it’s much better to say exactly what they are rather than appealing to some platonic notion of sex characteristics, which is both offensive and poorly communicates your position.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, and you did it more than once. No more of this, please, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
I only saw him once and I immediately understood how he could lead such a revolution.
It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
I am also very fond of Stallman, but we need to recognise that he had as many lovers as he had haters. He may have pushed many outside of the free software movement in fact because of his character.
I still think that the FSF needs a strong character with a clear vision, man or woman, but maybe with less orthodoxy than RMS.
Stallman has historically done pretty poorly at getting people involved in the free software movement. Before someone goes "surely you are talking about women and other underrepresented groups" no I am not talking about them, although that is also important of course. I'm talking about the people who are not hackers, the people who are stuck using Microsoft Office at their job but want to know about better options, the people who want their computer to not suddenly update and sell them ads but couldn't name a single programming language. Stallman has really dropped the ball for those people. I used to think he was quirky and principled too and I value his contributions but when I zoom out I've stopped finding that he's able to campaign for change effectively. Maybe he was qualified in 1980 but in a world where everyone has a phone in their pocket that is not only proprietary but that they can only really interact with as an appliance, perhaps he is not the most qualified person anymore.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm not sure this is guaranteed. GNU and the FSF have absolutely provided an enormous amount to the concepts and implementation of OS software. No doubt about it. Without it Linux would not exist, but it doesn't mean that'd have resulted in a widely used GNU alternative.
BUT, GNU/FSF also has a long history of losing focus on coding and spending a lot of time on political and philosophical arguments. I think it more likely BSD may have headed to where linux ended up than GNU. Linux was successful because they moved forwards and arguments were settled relatively quickly (for better and worse), whereas Hurd got stuck in development hell as people argued over how pure the microkernel architecture should be, pushing away people who just wanted things to work - including volunteers. During the crucial period over the 1990s, open source software needed to get things done (kind of like a startup). There are videos out there of people speaking at conferences about their work on Linux, and RMS being in the audience interjecting that it's "GNU/Linux" every time Linux was uttered. Who wants to work in an environment like that?
Even today, people are looking at more and more alternatives to important GNU software because of stagnation or other technical merits. GCC has lately seen alternatives become more common, as an example.
This also ignores the hostility the FSF historically has/had towards the commercial industry. Torvalds largely accepted patches from anybody if the code worked as intended.
Maybe something could have come out, but my gut tells me that people would have gravitated to something else that worked.
But how does this relate to gender? Even if you assume only two genders, why would being a feminine person play any role in their qualifications? That's what the comment was about.
I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, so naturally we have to weight gender over qualifications. It's just the way things are. I wish it wasn't and qualifications/ability played a 100% part in these decisions.
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't think that it's the latter. Btw, these studies also show that "experience", and "qualification" were distorted for no good reason.
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.
Nobody said otherwise. Even sexists say the same thing because they can hide behind “sex blindness”, just like with racists and color blindness.
Are you saying that women with that qualification have the same opportunities as men without external intervention? Then why did you even bring up sex, and why I need to show you how to express it?
I value effectiveness in manifesting change in the world. This takes many forms. I think one of the most depressing and myopic views that hackers have is that code rules everything, when in fact social movements live and die upon their accessibility and impact. If you think that laboring in a cave and writing the next Free text editor is going to bring about free software, the reality is that three proprietary editors have already eaten its lunch, the latter two of which are VC backed and soon to require cloud registration, and the last which was written using AI trained on your code that you very carefully structured to be unusable to build non-free software on top of.
You are right, it is not about writing a code. That's the common problem when discussing free software among geeks.
Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc.
But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.
Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.
If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
> every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG"
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
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
I don't mind the many multiple distributions but the default experience really sucks.
For example, there should only ever be one clipboard by default. If power users want multiple, they can go out of their way to configure their device config as such. Similarly, the function keys should function as function keys on a keyboard out of the box, without us having to fiddle with config files. Also the scroll wheel click to scroll should work out of the box without requiring editing config files. The default experience is still pretty poor.
The options thinking they're an island retreat only for those who agree with their way while standing on the same continent.
What's missing is building something that resonates with the user/consumer's experience backwards, not just personal preferences or interpretations, which is fine, but at that point it's a personal project, not a product, or much larger unless it really captivates both people who can contribute to creating it and also it is adopted quite easily.
Creating beginners can seem like something too many OSS projects can be allergic to. It's the greatest sin of too many projects, and they ultimately can't be freed of it.
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.
Hm, there is also an option to avoid creating yet another fork the moment someone said something unpopular, or to try helping improve existing solutions instead of creating yet another cool project that achieves nothing.
Of course no one can be forced to do so, but that's the problem - FOSS crowd would have to actually forced to cooperate, because otherwise petty dramas sabotage any common effort.
Forks happen, I think, because someone doesn't agree with the direction or can't get accepted into the clique of people working on something.
So if you tell them it's evil to fork you're saying, in effect, stop working.
I have lots of new functions for GNU make but the chance of getting them into make is almost 0 because the maintainer doesn't like this or that aspect of anything. Fortunately, I can make a fork. If people eventually show a desire to use my fork (nobody, unfortunately!) then he might eventually change his mind or develop some competing feature to kill mine off.
That's what is happening. To get people to pull together, they have to have a reason, like money.
> 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...?
I found a distro I love. I was a Fedora user but it just ended up being far too complicated with selinux. It is a miserable job to try to create RPM packages that work and also miserable to try to build anything out of git where the dependencies offered by fedora were too old - and then it wouldn't work without some kind of selinux config anyhow.
Ubuntu went down the weird GUI route but Linux Mint is OK - it's just nearly as complicated as Fedora.
Now I'm using Artix. The install was a bit old school but that's a one off effort. It's a rolling distribution so I almost never need to build dependencies to get something from git to work. There's never a "big upgrade". No selinux. The packaging system is extremely easy to use so I can often install the very latest e.g. chromium from git by building it myself and installing the package rather than a messy self-install in /usr/local.
In Artix all packages install with the dev component - no separation between dev and binary. For me this is vastly less hassle.
You can use Arch Linux (Artix is an arch derivative), with systemd if you want but I like Artix with dinit - it has all the ease of use of systemd but with an architecture that I prefer.
It's probable that none of this appeals to you, but I just wanted to point out that in an odd way I tumbled through lots of distros (including ones that I haven't mentioned) and found a little heavenly one that I love using every day because it suits my personality - perhaps you will too.
It's a great idea. Why not join forces with the PinePhone and Librem folks? They're building the hardware and I'm sure they could use more software folk to help out with the firmware and OS.
That's really as far as they need to go; if the userland is compatible with Linux, it can use all of the work that KDE and other organizations have put into building mobile interfaces.
These projects have stuff that works, but the lack of firmware for chips that can connect to modern cell infrastructure means that they can't really create an appealing product. The OS layer is where all previous Linux phone efforts have failed, and I hope the FSF makes it farther than everyone else has.
> The OS layer is where all previous Linux phone efforts have failed
The OS layer is where the existing projects are thriving, with various distros and shells to choose from to match one's needs and tastes. It's the appropriate hardware that's in undersupply. I'm using a Librem 5, a 2019 design, and if I wanted to switch to something newer I can't because there's no viable upgrade path on the market. No other hardware vendor has invested significant resources into mobile GNU/Linux since then, everything else is either purely community-based or uses Halium.
Does webrender work with the Librem 5? Last time I checked it didn't-- Firefox disallowed it because the etnaviv driver didn't have all the features available needed to enable it. It appears there's been a lot of work on etnaviv recently but I don't know if it affects this issue.
etnaviv doesn't do GLES3 yet, so no, but the work to support it (mostly done by Christian Gmeiner) is ongoing and progressing. I'm using Epiphany though, it's pretty snappy these days and I make extensive use of its webapp feature. I don't even remember when was the last time I had to fallback to Firefox because of some incompatibility, but it did happen at least once.
This is interesting, but the image thing that caught my eye is their use of the Apple app store logo (being on a slow connection, the video at top didn't load very fast)
Librephone is reverse engineering project that attempts to remove remaining proprietary binary modules, not a competing project.
> Triaging existing packages and device compatibility to find a phone with the fewest, most fixable freedom problems is the first step. From there, the FSF and Savoye aim to reverse-engineer and replace the remaining nonfree software. Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
For it to succeed, they must also help put pressure on governments (countries like Brazil or Italy) and banks to stop depending on "Play Integrity" because only Google has the keys (and blocks leaked ones) so we can't count on bypasses being available (it's not just a matter of obfuscation).
This needs to be done before age verification apps become universal..
There was a time the brazilian government mandated free software in government computers. Lots of people hated it unfortunately. Eventually Microsoft lobbying put an end to it. That was around ten years ago... I wonder if such a thing could ever repeat again.
My thinking on mobile devices, and voice/comms more generally, is that we're probably better off separating the telco-link, voice, and general compute capabilities.
One element of this could be a WiFi-only phone, effectively a VOIP endpoint which relies on whatever local WiFi is available for connectivity. Where a fixed-point WiFi isn't present, that phone could rely on a cellular WiFi hotspot. Given the various vulnerabilities and proprietary aspects of cellular comms, this at least offloads the security concerns to its own device.
Increasingly people are relying on Bluetooth devices to hear and speak through smartphones. The logical extension to me is to move the primary phone guts entirely into a Bluetooth earpiece or headset. This would handle the voice aspect of the call itself.
Palmtop computing appears all but entirely dead (with some DIY/hobbyist exceptions, e.g., the MNT Reform Next (<https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next>). There are also small-form-factor laptops, with 12" and smaller screens being comparable with tablets (and even some of the larger monster smartphones available today), but offering a full, user-controlled, operating system.
There's still the problem of software availability in an iOS/Android App-dominated world. It's technically possible to run many of these within a VM or emulated environment, but some app providers, particularly for financial interactions, attempt to detect and disable this. Ultimately regulation and/or lawsuits may be necessary.
As power-hungry as they are, mobile devices do make remarkable use of available battery capabilities, which is a place traditional laptops will struggle with. There's the question of having to carry multiple devices, though I suspect many of us are doing so already. There's also the possibility that market segmentation will make such users attractive to business and other institutions, reducing the barriers that presently exist.
All that said, I do applaud the FSF's effort, though I would like to see other paths (such as the one I suggest here) pursued as well.
I'm currently hacking a toy OS in Zig on the PinePhone, and I have to say the documentation is a bit painful, or sometimes just missing, for parts of these complex SoCs, and that is meant to be a fairly open platform.
But the modem binary blob is a whole other world, and I am not sure how they could tackle that, since my understanding is that this is partly done for carrier licensing reasons? ie. to avoid abuse on the cellular networks. So isn't an open source radio driver also going to have to be licensed in the same way, and then ultimately shared as another binary blob?
The PinePhone compromise seems to be 'isolating' the modem & blob at the end of a USB link. Although I'm not 100% sure how that works yet, since I only just got the graphics & fonts working.
But even that is a bit of a puzzler, since I'm currently framebuffer-to-lcd based, but I know there is a Mali GPU hiding somewhere. I suspect that will also involve another blob. Anyway, the framebuffer approach seems fine for now, it is booting in ~2s, and the less binary blobs involved the better.
It will be interesting to see what FSF can achieve. But, personally I think they would be better focusing on a fully open-hardware dumb phone, and build upon that.
They work fine for data and SMS, but it gets complicated once you need audio routing (it's rare for a modem to expose audio over USB) or waking up from low power mode to answer the incoming call. Could be done with M.2 USB modules and some dedicated controller in-between though.
Vita had a WWAN variant. What that means is, hardware wise it's trivial, business wise it's impossible. It's always has been that way. It took Apple under peak Jobs leadership couple years to sell the iPhone globally.
With phone hardware lifetime so short, would it be possible to catch-up with hardware update cycle? I guess each new version of a phone can ship with new versions of binary blob drivers. As mentioned in the announcement, reverse engineering the blobs is a huge effort, when it is done, hardware may already be out of sale and the effort would need to be repeated for new versions.
I want this, even if it means we have to pay some of the people who work on this.
> Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
It may well be that Google will not rest until "Android-compatible" means that they can put their foot down on this. We should be prepared for that eventuality.
Cool idea, but I’m skeptical. I just want a phone that works—calls, texts, banking apps, and a good camera. If this Librephone can’t run my usual apps or needs me to wait years for it to work with new phones, I’ll stick to my current one. Why not team up with projects that already exist instead of starting over? Hope it works out, but I won’t hold my breath.
I think you misunderstood what they're planning to do.
Librephone isn't going to be releasing their own OS. It's an effort to systematically replace binary blobs so that existing projects like GrapheneOS and LineageOS are more free.
Took them long enough... The free software movement was still stuck on PC despite the fact the whole world moved to mobile. Glad to see they're finally starting to catch up.
They should probably prepare themselves to make ideological concessions... The situation is very ugly here in mobile land. Treacherous computing, remote attestation, DRM, all ubiquitous and normalized...
The way I read this is that the FSF has gotten funding for one guy to work on this project. Great but as soon as you're doing anything hardware related you need to expend a lot of development effort just keeping up with new releases from hardware manufacturers. It's a never ending treadmill.
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.
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.
Given the nature of the phone hardware, would it be easier to develop a phone architecture from the ground up rather than trying to reverse engineer the existing phones? For instance, wouldn't it be easier to start with a power efficient, battery-powered SBC and then add on components needed for a phone rather than trying to reverse engineer a whole bunch of binary blobs and run into issues with DMCA etc?
Great idea. I'd love to hear something realistic like, "Practically everyone who uses a phone or computer is under surveillance. While this project may seem late relative to the damage done thru unlawful surveillance over previous decades, it represents a start that could lead to better privacy for some early adopters and gradual shift away from the blobs and proprietary technology that place control of our hardware in other hands than our own."
>Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom
I am so happy they are focusing on Android, one of the most popular operating systems widely used by every day people. This is important work for providing user friendly, free software to users.
Let's just hope they don't fall into the trap of disqualifying binary blobs sent as part of drivers vs opting for hardware that harcodes the blob.
Are you hoping the Free Software Foundation _doesn't_ prioritize Free Software? For people who are okay with random bits of proprietary software doing who-knows-what on their devices there are various alternatives already.
Open Source Firmware signed by OS > Firmware blob signed by device manufacturer > Firmware blob hardcoded by device Manufacturer
The FSF treats hardcoded firmware blobs as "free" and updatable firmware blobs as nonfree despite there not being a big difference between them in practice. And practical differences like being able to fix security issues benefits users.
There are by now thousands of examples of this, I wonder why you would ask for an example, this is about as uncontroversial as the sun going up tomorrow.
The number of times that Linux distros, free software, has made my computer unusable, requiring me to manually fix it, is uncountable. Bugs from OS updates is still entirely possible even without updating firmware blobs.
Yes, agreed, the entire idea of OTA updates to cars has a lot of bad consequences. No matter the license.
So when we analyze the entire position of the FSF, all three cases listed above, I don't think you actually agree with them. FSF isn't against updating firmware on the fly, they just want certain things when it happens. And those things won't improve safety.
But: Stallman & the FSF are idealists, they are not in a position to argue for practical measures, by definition they have to take a relatively extremist position and dig in. If they didn't do that they would get nowhere. So I understand why they're doing it but I do not think their stance is overly practical or workable. But everybody will dilute that stance in their own particular way and so the net effect is potentially positive. If they would take a much milder stance then that positive effect would be diminished.
I would say that exempting unchangeable blobs is a big concession all by itself and the idealist position is that roms with programs need to be open source too.
The OP's point is, having the firmware permanently burnt-in on a ROM chip vs loaded as a binary blob via a driver doesn't change the "non-free"-ness of the firmware itself.
So opting for hardware which has a "fully-open-source" driver, but runs a binary blob encoded into the hardware, doesn't make the system fully open.
It's a take for a more Free system, not for accepting binary blobs.
(Or I guess for acknowledging that if you're willing to allow binary blobs stored in hardware, then dynamically-loaded binary blobs doesn't change the "free"-ness.)
Great. But IMHO better regulation is still needed: force makers to have unlockable bootloader and provided libre drivers for their device (for the OS that they originally ship with); force makers to provide alternatives - for example using alternative "play services" by only providing general API that others can provide pluggable implementaions…
Is there any other way than going through reverse engineering? Projects like LineageOS and others have shown this is really hard.
Why not simply start from scratch and make a truly open source phone? That is, design and build the electronics and the OS that goes on top of it. A bit like an iPhone+iOS but fully open source. Is this dream really unreachable?
I applaud the move, but it's going to be really hard if manufacturers aren't willing to document their chipsets and keep bootloaders locked. The folks at Pine64 were forced to waste resources to develop their own platform, which after the enormous effort ant time invested resulted outdated the day it came out of the factory, because of that.
This is exciting, exceptionally the firmware & binary blob foundations that are the biggest roadblock.
Concerning the UI, I wish we had another attempt at a web-based mobile OS. FirefoxOS was too early, but APIs are much more mature now, and WASM offers great performance for low-level stuff. I might work on this full time when I retire.
One might think governments could get on board for the sake of digital independence/sovereignty ; but so far that hasn’t been the reality. One day digital sovereignty could become a real priority, then it could happen.
The concept of "outdated" is imposed by big tech itself through artificial restrictions. Apps are forced to update their minimum supported OS versions. Upgrades are stopped after 1 or 2 years. And so on.
Anyone who has replaced Windows 8 or Windows 10 on their 5+ year old machine with a distro like Xubuntu/Lubuntu realizes that "outdated" is often a sales propaganda term, not necessarily a technical term.
Does anyone know where the Linaro wiki has disappeared to?
An initiative that supports a (quasi) mainline linux kernel and driver support for smartphones seems like the more logical initiative before ironing in a smartphone linux distribution.
The fact that there is proprietary software running in "open source" mobile phone OSes may not be addressing the source of the problem. Because it seems that by funding a project like this it almost implies that the parties funding it don't necessarily trust the people who own and thus could open source the proprietary blobs tomorrow.
The leap I seem to have trouble getting to is this. If you can't trust the people responsible for the proprietary software, how can you be sure that they won't turn around and start using new chips or software once the existing ones are reverse engineered? Perhaps it's about patents and the patent holders could be using this IP as a cash cow?
I’m not saying this shouldn’t exist, because it should, but does anyone actually have any faith that the FSF can actually do anything here? They’re like 15 years late to the party
Yeah, you really got projects mixed up. It was Replicant, the attempt at creating a libre Android distro, that got stalled. Stalled due to being unable to work around the nonfree device firmware and binary blobs found in today's smartphone models.
In contrast, Librephone has only been aannounced this week, and it attempts to reverse engineer stuff related to device firmware and binary blobs. It's not the same as creating another Android distro, and any usable results won't be tied to Android, so they for example can be used to give better support for mobile non-Android Linux efforts.
FSF never does and never will understand good software. The problem they have is they don't care about the user as much as they care about the developer. They want everything to be easy for the developer and they put the user second.
Full-width line of text. Readability nightmare. Here is how it looks with just a link to a CSS (I closed my eyes on the cssbed.com and picked one at random).
Yup, that's pretty bad. But, as an old fart with old eyes, I now use Safari and click the 'reader' version on many sites. Frankly, the web in it's early years was preferable to much of what I see nowadays. But, like I say, I'm an old fart. Heck, I used punch cards throughout my undergraduate days.
How will this phone comply with child safety laws?
*Edit* Because Idiots are Downvoting me, look at the texas law SB 2420 as an example. These phones will essentially be illegal in texas unless they comply with already passed laws.
Not sure, but perhaps it could be somewhat easier to take them seriously if you had actually clicked on the link instead of living in an alternate reality where it's about "planning to create their own phone".
For years they have studiously ignored the fact that the mobile phone is the place where many people engage with IT and have been faffing about in the desktop and server space.
Instead of leading they have always trailed behind. What they should have been doing was focusing on the software vision which they will most definitely screw up.
Focus on the software vision and wait for the deblobblable hardware to emerge or commission their own hardware from scratch.
I'm sorry but these guys have and will always be useless, much like the Wayland project.
How many years has that crew taken to create something fully capable of replacing X11?
Finally! It took the FSF long enough to catch up with the overwhelming usage of mobile devices, but it's better late than never.
I like that this project is trying to tackle something much more challenging that can't be done with just software: reverse engineering device firmware and binary blobs, the pieces of software that actually make hardware components interface with an OS. Understanding how this stuff functions is key to being able to write replacement software, so we may have less non-free software to deal with. I don't have any experience in trying to reverse engineer software, so the best I can do for now is cheer on from outside, unless I want to try my hands at this stuff later.
I also like that this project is not intending to produce an Android-based distro, but focusing more on reverse engineering. Although I read that the results are targeted at helping developers of Android-compatible OSes, the results can hopefully be used by non-Android [GNU/]Linux distros and perhaps other *nix stuff, like the BSD distros. The FSF (by way of developer Rob Savoye) recognizing that a project like this is not going to be quick, easy, or cheap, and is a long term effort is good, as that likely means this project isn't going to be easily abandoned just because of not being able to produce quick results.
I hope that this whole effort can eventually let us break free of the Apple-Google mobile device duopoly, as it sure is getting tiring for me to stick with one of these two companies for my mobile computing needs.
> the results can hopefully be used by non-Android [GNU/]Linux distros
That was stated as a goal at the FSF 40 event, videos of which should be online in the next few days.
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 project and a lot of work later there is still limited hardware support. Having to put this effort in for all the models of phones seems massive.
One would hope that enough things stay similar between devices that replacing, say, the galaxy s25 paves the way for a far easier implementation of the s26, particularly now that the market is stagnating a bit.
And I’m not knowledgeable about this at all, but intuitively I’d expect apple stuff to be much more customized than the average android phone - they’re famous for vertical integration and owning the end to end process.
Phones aren't x86, each is own snowflake, and on Android the nature of being a managed userspace, means there is a certain freedom regarding which ARM designs that Samsung, Qualcomm, Mediatek, and whatever else is out there comes up with.
Then there is everything else that happens to be on the motherboard.
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.
>Using the pixel camera vs using default configuration with an app called open camera, the difference is so clear.
Is this hardware dependent though?
I ask because I’ve seen custom android mods that port the pixel camera, presumably if that works for other devices it’s a good sign that postprocessing can be decoupled from specific hardware.
I, too, have noticed this. Would be curious if anyone has a more in-depth article to read about why the difference is so stark!
puri.sm/posts/cameras-its-complicated/
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.
On the other hand, you can take DNG RAW images and do the software processing later, except exactly the way you want. I rather like that flexibility, myself.
>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.
1) The article states they are focusing on the phone model that they guess will require the least work to become totally free. This may make the project useless, but it does give it some hope of finishing.
2) The hope is that the M2-M5 won’t be that different from the M1 models - after all, Apple doesn’t want to spend their money reinventing the wheel without compelling reason. I think that is less likely with phones from different manufacturers, though Android phones typically share a lot of single source components.
> The hope is that the M2-M5 won’t be that different from the M1 models - after all, Apple doesn’t want to spend their money reinventing the wheel
From the Asahi Linux website, M2 is sufficiently similar to M1, while M3 and M4 won't likely be supported soon due to significant differences.
They're aiming to perfect their support for M1/M2 prior to working on the M3 and later models. Seems like a sensible choice, given that even a baseline M1 or M2 Mac is still a highly compelling device for a vast majority of uses. And Asahi will become more relevant as these devices cease to be supported by newer releases of macOS.
>a baseline M1 or M2 Mac is still a highly compelling device for a vast majority of uses.
Maybe in 2020. Lenovo released an ARM chromebook this summer which has benchmark performance of M1/M2 chips and is perfectly supported by Linux (ChromeOS) out of the box.
Yes it will take many years. This whole thing has already played out with FSF and Replicant. They ended up stuck working on a couple of ever aging devices as many new generations of devices were launched and all the technologies in smartphones evolved.
If people want open devices they should maybe better explore open hardware. Im not talking about devices, like Librem where the schematics are open but the chips, which are the parts which do all the work, are all closed, but rather devices with open silicon.
Can you name such devices? Precursor?
> The Apple Silicon macbooks seem a good example. The M1 came out about 5 years ago now and with a whole project and a lot of work later there is still limited hardware support. Having to put this effort in for all the models of phones seems massive.
Apple Silicon isn't a single SoC. They have support for the M1 and M2 lines across both Macbooks, the Mini, iMac and Studio.
It's the same thing with phones, isn't it? You're not starting over for each individual phone. First you get one device working which uses some popular chip, which is a large undertaking. But then all the other devices that use the same chip are nearly working and it's not a matter of starting over, it's a matter of mapping the couple of changes they made to the base design.
Meanwhile the chip designs themselves are incremental, so the 2026 device is really the 2023 device with a die shrink and a new feature.
How is that going for e.g. postmarketOS? Doesn’t seem to be that simple
I thought Asahi Linux had made some pretty sizeable progress, it was a very impressive project and labour of love and talent.
Been running the latest lineageos without google crapware on oneplus 6. It is amazing
When it is this late, it might as well have been never.
That's certainly not the case here, even if it's true sometimes. The duopoly is gradually tightening their grip on the customers' wallets. It's worth it at any stage to reverse their cash grab.
This is bound to fail unless they get the full stack and even then, it will be for specific phone models, x86 is an anomaly in having a cloning freedom that IBM did not intended.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
If you think just by using Librephone powered device is going to be safer, good luck.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19870406
Open firmware is but one part of the equation. The evolutionary pressure of state actors trying to deploy malware on iOS and Android forces those platforms to develop vulnerability mitigations and security architectures that currently just are not matched by anything in FOSS. Desktop linux is woefully insecure compared to these platforms. I don't want it to be, but it seems that, unless you are ready to use Qubes, no one has the time and effort to further the security of desktop linux in any meaningful way.
> Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS.
The time is right for this project I hope they succeed.
The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.
That said, the phone market is huge. They could sell enough devices to fund future development which might be good enough even if it doesn’t slow down Apple or Google. At least then there will be a device for those of us who are not happy with the state of things.
> because people are generally happy with their phones.
Maybe thats exactly why it can succeed now. The phone tech has plateud to the point where a 5 year old phone performs almost identically as a new one and this is when people can afford to experiment and take more risks.
Also its much easier for free software to catch up now as most problems are already solved and/or easy to copy.
I don't mind having a second phone, esp. if it's a foldable which can be a great reader and a small "linux in a pocket". There might even be some use-cases, for example I recently wanted to implement a type-c external GPS antenna, and found out that it's a pain on Android (done via "developer mode" hacks etc.), and impossible on iOS.
That being said, very low expectations on this project.
> people are generally happy with their phones
I'm not. Samsung treats my phone like dirt. I'd love to have some actual ownership of a device I spent $900 on last year.
I don't think my wife is happy with her iPhone either. She bought one of those little NFC fridge magnet things that locks your phone out of social media apps. She and I are dissatisfied in different ways, but there's a theme here.
Tbf parent did say that people are _generally_ happy with their phones. I.e. they didn't say everyone is.
The project will accomplish much if those who want it have better choices, even if they’re not perfect.
They don’t need to replace or even challenge Apple and Google for market adoption, just be there and be a viable alternative used by a noticeable minority of people.
Getting half as far as desktop linux would be a fantastic achievement.
> much because people are generally happy with their phones.
Talked to many iPhone owners this year? The 17 hardware has a bizarre choice of a camera button / pointless physical change, and IOS 26 is pretty much hated by everyone.
I use iPhone, and have happily for years but F if this isn’t the worst OS I can remember. The first downgrade really.
I like the action button and have no issues whatsoever with iOS 26.
Your “everyone” seems to be substituting for “me” an awful lot.
Have you been around when iOS 7 was released? If not, I’d say that was the same, whatever that means. Things might get better, but we’re not entitled to it.
I think they will fail because they fundamentally don't understand the problem.
Android does not contain binary blobs because of some evil conspiracy against free software. If they could get away with it, the whole damn thing would be open source.
The problem is those blobs do things that interact with complex hardware for which only blobs are available. Even if you reverse engineer them, you are going to get sued into oblivion because of the patents you are going to need to infringe on to make functional replacements.
But even if you get a blessing from the component manufacturers, your new hippie binary blobs need to be certified to legally operate on cellular and wifi frequencies in most parts of the world. If you decide you don't like something and change it - as is the open source way - that new version with your modifications needs to be certified too. Carriers do not allow uncertified devices on their networks.
The blobs are there to assure you need to throw away your perfectly fine phone every 3 years due to lack of software updates.
If it all was open source, the community could quite easily provide updates - you can run a modern Linux distro on 10+ years old laptop just fine.
> If they could get away with it, the whole damn thing would be open source.
Who is "they"? Certainly not Google. Google has been moving open-source Android functionality into the closed-source Google Play Services for many years.
No one is going sue the fsf into oblivion. The movement has decades of legal experience, if a company would be dumb enough that company would just burn money and lose. Especially about reverse engineering software, as if patents had any power there. Apple, the end boss in that regard, not fighting on that level against the m1 project is proof enough.
Second, fuck the carriers. Certifications will not persist as soon as real Foss phones are available. Nothing persists against a world of free hardware invading a realm. And even if: freeing everything around a modem blob would still be a big step forward.
It's frankly ridiculous to assume the people working on this and the organisation that already supported replicant knowns nothing about the mobile space.
I understand it might seem confusing if you are not familiar with the requirements, but they are not trivial to bypass.
Cell phones operate in licensed radio spectrum, so they need to have proper testing and certification (https://www.fcc.gov/oet/ea/rfdevice). Any device not properly certified would be illegal to manufacture or import into the US.
Separately cellular networks require PTCRB certification of the devices to ensure they are interoperable with the network (https://www.ptcrb.com/). The FSF could in theory write custom firmware for baseband and wifi chips, but they would need to seek certification as this would be considered a substantial modification. It would likely require cooperation from the chip manufactures to provide samples with various testing/debugging harnesses enabled.
Qualcomm and the like would probably sue to stop the FSF on the basis that it could put their own device certifications into jeopardy.
That isn't even touching on non-transmitting components like GPUs or sensors where the actual functional logic may be split between hardware and software (your blob driver). Even by doing a clean room reimplementation, you risk infringing on software patents, and will have little flexibility to work around them since the hardware will expect things to be done a specific way.
You would think it would be ridiculous to assume the people working on this know nothing about the mobile space, yet their actions do bring that into question.
I think all your concerns are valid but they are not necessarily insurmountable. The FSF or whatever other entity could do just what you suggest and seek certification within the current legal frameworks. They could also talk to the carriers and negotiate individually which is probably going to be quite annoying and slow but it's not impossible and it's not like that's not done in the commercial space. The could build mechanisms into the hard-/firmware that takes your device off whatever regulated spectrum/provider if you modify anything that is in regulated territory (as watched over by some form of maintainer-quorum-signing-negotiation-structure). I'm sure there are many mechanisms and processes one could come up with that could keep with regulatory or other control aspects while still keeping things open.
All that patent and legal business is probably a more important/existential concern and a go/nogo-factor if you want to be a commercial player in a market-driven environment and less so for an entity like the FSF.
This is aounds similar to the objections that were raised against the GNU project in the 80s.
> The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.
Is there survey data available on this? Anecdotally, everybody I know hates their phones. In fact, I think if you asked, "what's the biggest pain point in your life right now?" I think most people will point to their phones.
You might need to expand your social circle a bit.
If you asked normal average people "what's the biggest pain point in your life right now?" they would point to financial, societal, or health issues.
The vast majority of people when asked specifically about their phones probably wish that they were a newer model or had a longer battery life. As long as it communicates with people, lets them access banking and social media, and has a few of their niche hobby/entertainment apps nobody actually cares about the licensing of the modem firmware or the fact you can't install TempleOS on it.
Maybe, but that pain point isn't something free software is going to fix. Obviously not everyone has the same problems with their phone, but largely I think they fall into a few categories: notification overload, apps designed to keep you scrolling for every last minute of the day, and dark patterns or other design choices aimed at separating users from as much of their money as possible.
Every single one of these is fixable on any modern phone. Stop using social media, take a hatchet to what apps can send you notifications and when, and be more mindful of what tricks are commonly deployed to steal your attention, time, and money.
But people can't even manage that. They don't even have to do anything, they just have to stop doing certain things, but they can't or won't. Those same people aren't going to go through the effort to switch, and even if they did they would end up re-creating the same thing that makes them miserable currently.
Indeed, this is the right time. I really want to daily drive a linux phone, but i dont want to buy a used phone. I hope this brings more hardware support for newer phones.
I'm willing to suffer a rough beta or alpha experience, but let me use modern hardware of my choice.
Why not used?
I'm kinda the opposite, I don't want to buy new any more. Currently rocking a 2nd hand Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS and loving it.
If battery life is the issue, that's fair enough. I've bought a couple of wireless charging docks that I spread around the places I frequently spend my time, so if it needs a boost I can charge her up just by plonking it on the dock. Most of the time, though, she makes it through the day from (maximum charge for battery longevity reasons) 80% down to 30%, maybe 25% or 20% if there's lots of interesting news in a day.
But I'm not a particularly heavy user and I don't game on it.
If rich techies on this website want to support something worthwhile, here you go
Not rich but is there a way to contribute specifically to this project? The donate button on the website does not work.
As the first project FSF has launched in years with a current budget of one developer I expect they will be happy to spend new donations on further funding for it. However, it is very uncommon for a nonprofit to have a separate fund for a project that is part of the organization itself, rather than a project which makes semi-independent decisions and is fiscally sponsored by a related nonprofit. The exception is usually when some very large donor which insists on that arrangement.
I was talking to someone who is involved in a nature conservation nonprofit recently - small donations go into the general pot of money for the organization to choose how to spend it. If you want to influence what the money is used for you have to donate a significantly higher sum. They said they like having many small donors because they can fund things that don't necessarily make a big splash in a press release but are important precursors to impact (e.g. researching what projects would have the most impact vs actually implementing a project).
I would have expected an online means to contribute specifically to Librephone, but indeed, seems like nothing yet. Hopefully it is forthcoming.
Otherwise, their website suggests you can specify a particular project via the memo line of a check:
https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate/
Upon commenting, I removed the snarky part of the website being visually… well, bad. After all, FSF isn’t about design and aesthetics, right? But donate button not working demonstrates the whole seriousness of the effort.
The time is right: the building is burning down around us, time to buy a fire extinguisher
Well… mixed feelings here. I spent a lot of time dealing with early smartphones and hacking away at Android, Tizen, FirefoxOS (remember that?) and several variations on that theme back when manufacturers were vying for differentiation, and I get that the FSF has a mission, but I don’t see this panning out.
Like many folk who’ve been watching Google’s gradual shutdown of AOSP and alignment with Apple in terms of platform lockdown, I think the days of fully open devices are actually coming to a close. Again, I applaud the FSF’s initiative, but you need to get a lot of buy-in for this kind of thing to work—-manufacturers, developers (both OS and app devs), and, of course, users, who will never accept anything that doesn’t let them do things like banking, shopping, mainstream social apps, etc.
And you can’t do a lot of those on an unlocked boot loader (which I think is going to be the logical consequence of replacing bits of the OS) without more hacking. It’s like XML and violence—-it will only lead to more of the same.
I expect the usual amount of “you can do that with web apps” pushback, but let’s be real. Except in markets like India where simpler and vastly cheaper platforms make sense, you either use iOS, Android, or… nothing but voice calls, and I don’t see enough here to make me think this will be something for everyone.
> you can do that with web apps
And this is not even always possible. In Ukraine, government app is released as an app, not a web service. Same goes for banking app. You just can't do these things from other devices, you must have (mainstream) Android or Apple phone.
I've been looking into projects like GrapheneOS for a while now, but it is just impossible to use in Ukraine.
Genuinely curious: why can't you use GrapheneOS in Ukraine? Most Android apps work perfectly. In my case, the only ones that don't are the ones made by lazy developers who rely on location data that I deny. They claim to work without it, but obviously never tested.
Maybe I can after all! I saw on reddit people complaining about banking apps not working, so I just assumed mine would not work as well. But according to this list [1], the biggest Ukrainian banks are supported. Nice
I can't find any info on the government app though. It might not work. But still, I can actually consider GrapheneOS now.
[1] https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
If it's a government app, you can pressure the government in many more way than you can let's say a bank - and FSF has experience in that kind of pressure. I hope their technical initiative also comes with a parallel legal/policy initiative that tries to get governments to stop using things like attestation.
> If it's a government app, you can pressure the government in many more way than you can let's say a bank
Many more, like?
For an individual, almost none. I can boycott a bank (if it's not a government one), I can't boycott my own government, only leave.
An organization can start an initiative, but without an interested party involved it's only an initiative, you can hardly call it "pressure".
You can't boycott a bank, they all do the same shit and you need to have one.
With a government, however, you can go through your MPs, use administrative procedures to lodge complaints, etc. They also don't have Visa/Mastercard forcing them into attestation, it's usually just because the contractor thought it made things More Secure™.
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. So to me it's the lack of digital sovereignty from the EU and our individual countries that is the main issue. Sure it would be nice if big tech didn't close their platforms, but that ship appears to have sailed. If they ever get around to making these apps available through a different store, then I don't see why I wouldn't want a different OS.
We still need open hardware and more companies like fairphone to utilize it, but we primarily need the EU to get it's act together and break the reliance on big tech app stores. I know there are a few companies trying to build app stores with the necessary security compliance and if the EU wants to be serious about digital sovereignty it'll need to support these.
> 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 themselves.
GrapheneOS supports Google Play (it ships with an app that lets you install it in one click), it does NOT give you root access, and it goes through the extra effort of implementing the obscure security features that banking apps require. I won't say 100%, but maybe 99% of apps on Google Play will work on Graphene, including banking apps. This compatibility, along with the added security and privacy features are why it's such a big deal. It's not just hype around the latest shiny custom ROM.
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 compatibility, and especially the fact that they just got RCS messaging working. But any time Google or even an app vendor wants to tighten the noose, they can, just by requiring the higher, hardware-backed attestation level.
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.
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...
> you are swapping Google Android for GrapheneOS Android
No? You're adding support for Graphene's keys, not replacing Google's. Obviously, the main barrier is convincing developers of these apps to add support for Graphene's keys. However, this is only a problem for apps that opted to implement the Play Integrity API at all, which doesn't seem to be very common. All the recent monopoly rulings against Google may be deterring devs from implementing this obviously anti-competitive feature, and that's not to mention Google's new responsibility to offer the Play store app catalog to competing stores, thanks to the Epic case.
> The injunction issued last year by U.S. District Judge James Donato requires Google to allow users to download rival app stores within its Play store and make Play's app catalog available to competitors. Those provisions do not take effect until July 2026.
(source: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...)
Maybe they'll get away with requiring competing stores to implement Play Integrity API, maybe (probably) not.
Also, that list of incompatible apps is probably out of date since I use the ebay app all the time with no issues.
My point was that this situation doesn't allow for Software Freedom, since you the user cannot control the OS, its an unmodifiable blob unless you are either someone with a blessed key (like Google, or GrapheneOS devs), or are willing and able to to go without the apps that use the attestation APIs, or have one locked down device for attestation apps and a separate one that you can actually control. Probably the only way to deal with that is make attestation to third parties illegal, I assume governments and banks would get exempted from such laws though.
Android has a hardware attestation API that is compatible with GrapheneOS (if the app accepts GOS's keys), but nobody uses it. Everyone uses the Play Integrity API; GrapheneOS can't pass the "strong" (hardware-backed) level of Play Integrity, though it passes the weaker ones.
The Dutch electronic identification app, DigiD, uses the Android-native attestation API.
Also good to make a distinction between the different things you can do in an attestation procedure: bootloader/boot integrity checks, attest a specific key, and ID (imei etc) attestation.
I understand your views.
However, I still stand by the idea of having options. Many of us in developed Countries are likely to remain on our IPhones or Androids, but there is still a chance for FSF to shine in other areas.
Also, as someone who was a FirefoxOS user (I think around 2011-2016) I am always open to replacing my Android with FREE (as in freedom) alternatives.
As I mentions in previous comments - the main "fight" is convenience vs freedom.
Either we have the convenience of being able to do things on our devices with little effort of all (with variations of lockdowns and/or less control)... or we run something that respects your freedoms but some things require a few more seconds/minutes to do.
Personally, I would choose the latter. However, I know I am the minority in the world of phones.
Don't get me wrong. I am not some freedom(software) fighter. I accept that there is a convenience I need on phones today. In the workplace, I need MS Teams. If I don't have this, my Company will have to offer me a Work phone. Other than this, I do use it for banking, map navigation, etc. However, these are not deal breakers for me.
Also, we have the convenience with AI, which more and more will adapt like a special friend, will make things ever harder in the freedom world. Be interesting to see how this evolves.
At the end of the day - things change. It's hard to think like this but we don't know what we will be using in the next 10 years. Maybe in this universe, Microsoft Windows might still be king in the OS world. However, in another Universe Microsoft ends up making too many poor decisions even businesses are open to alternatives.
It's the same thing for smart devices. Apple might make a STUPID decision in the next 10 years. Although we still have Android variants on the market, the Librephone might get a big push by ex-Apple users.
We shall see. If this project does well and can do certain types of "convenience" then I would be willing to try it!
It is always a pleasure to have something with convenience but does not cost my freedom.
> ..users, who will never accept anything that doesn’t let them do things like banking, shopping, mainstream social apps, etc.
Plenty of users are now buying feature phones that don't come with these features. Think of a libre phone as a uniquely user-focused, distraction-free device that still allows for a core smartphone/PDA compute featureset.
> 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 Replicant has been stuck for several years, and they recognize that they need to find a new device, funding, etc.
(After Replicant, I spent some time on PostmarketOS with various devices, and then gave up and bought iPhones, and then got ticked off and moved to GrapheneOS.)
I wonder whether the FSF is already collaborating with Purism on this, to leverage their work on the Librem 5 and PureOS, which I believe the FSF is well aware of. If the FSF manages to muster a lot more open source volunteers on a more affordable hardware, but that work is also usable for Librem 5, then it could be a win-win. (And Purism also has something called Liberty Phone, which is a made-in-USA Librem 5 phone, so their lawyers should talk about trademarks in any case.)
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/
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 project had eyed it as a target device [2].
That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.
[1]: https://github.com/GloDroidCommunity/pine64-pinephone/releas...
[2]: https://blog.replicant.us/2024/03/replicant-status-and-repor...
You make it sound like the Redpine card ended up being shitty because of RYF efforts. The Redpine card was chosen because of its internal flash, but the fact that the vendor failed to properly support the advertised features (and even removed some that worked before), abandoned its mainline driver and pretty much halted the firmware development after SiLabs acquisition is orthogonal to that and could have happened with a different card as well. So nice it was a replaceable M.2 card, isn't it? ;)
> Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.
The LineageOS folks are working on supporting their OS on Linux-first devices running a close-to-mainline (not AOSP) kernel. So it could go either way. Of course if they do choose an Android-first device, their efforts would ultimately also make it easier to run a mainline kernel on it as shown by projects like pmOS.
That's nice to know. Do you happen to have some links to where I could read up more on this effort?
> That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.
Is there any actually relevant alternative to this oligopoly? Apple doesn't sell to third parties, NVDA lacks a baseband and so does (to my knowledge) Broadcom, and it's been ages since I saw anything from Intel in the mobile space.
UniSoc maybe? It appears to be reverse-engineerable [0].
[0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Jolla_C2_(jolla-c2)
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).
> If the FSF manages to muster a lot more open source volunteers
First line of my pitch is, "When hundreds of millions of people need something, it doesn't make sense to wait for a handful of volunteers to build it for free."
hahahahaha 2k for a phone that cannot last a day. yeah no. i d rather go for a redmi with postmarket os. it does not even have a blob free modem
That's their US made patriot phone, the regular less than half of that. Also, please read up on the concept of economies of scale.
If you go with postmarketOS (good!), and don't want to touch anything that touched Purism, better avoid anything GTK (Phosh, GNOME Mobile and related apps). While Purism did not make a competitive phone, their investments into libre software went great and keep paying off.
no i wont. it is literally that simple. the regular device has 3 gb of ram. the flagship has 4gb for 4k and released 4 years ago. also yeah i do try to avoid anything gtk but not for any particular reason. i just prefer qt.
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 is where I feel they could truly make the biggest difference for freedom for the average user.
I think this is the right place to start.
A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there. If the OS is tightly controlled, we have no recourse.
Even in the worst case scenario, we could use a cheap big-tech-approved phone for these applications (a glorified digital token) and use the free phone for everything else. When there's enough adoption and trust in the new phone, non-technical avenues are available to influence these organizations to accept the alternative.
I've kinda migrated to the worst-case scenario already and it's really not that bad - for my use case.
I have an old phone (actually running LineageOS rather than stock) that works as you perfectly describe as a glorified digital token. This device doesn't come with me. There's no banking I need to do, on a day-to-day basis, requiring said token, that has to be done right now or the world will end. It can wait until I get home (and I usually use the bank's web interface from a desktop). This device has minimal other apps installed, which limits bank app accessibility of other app data, and other app accessibility of bank data.
Then my GrapheneOS daily driver serves my day-to-day needs with minimal data leakage, tracking, ads, other general paranoia-inducing modern-life shit.
I pay for things on a day-to-day basis with a physical debit card due to an existing habit of not wanting to depending on a single device for "all the things", so GrapeheneOS wasn't a downgrade, but it should be noted to others that whilst Google Wallet can run on GrapheneOS, NFC payments through the Google Wallet will not work due to Full SafetyNet requirements that GrapheneOS can not pass. Non-NFC items such as tickets and boarding passes have been reported to work (and I'm pretty sure I've used it for that, although Google Wallet is no longer installed on my device).
I see a trend of banks pushing people off of their websites onto the mobile app.
That is a slight concern, but I don't see it happening, at least in Australia for the big four banks, in the near future.
If that became the case, then the 'glorified token device' would become the dedicated banking device, and not much else would change (ie. I still wouldn't be doing 'banking' while I'm out and about).
It sounds utopian except you still have to pay for a cell plan on said device, no? How else to obtain a phone number for MFA?
No, just connected via wifi. I don't use it outside the house. The MFA token comes via the banking app itself, not via SMS.
If it came by SMS my daily driver would receive it.
You already have a cell plan. It doesn't have to be attached to the same device.
Hopefully by not using MFA that depends on SMS.
Unfortunately there are non-SMS MFA that are still tied to a phone number, and you may be forced into using them for some context. Duo Mobile is one.
To me that sounds like sacrificing living for a principle and missing the point.
I hadn't migrated my life to any of the (tiny, possibly zero) convenience improvements that "mobile banking" may offer me, so none of what I've described has been any kind of downgrade in 'living'.
(I don't mean this in a sarcastic way) are you able to make tangible what 'living' I may be sacrificing?
Having a separate phone as a "glorified digital token" is probably within the top 3 things you want to do anyway if you are serious about digital security.
See the recent discussion about pixnapping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45574613
Also, if your bank uses SMS for verification then the phone should have its own phone number which you keep secret. Otherwise it's one data leak and one sim swap attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_swap_scam) from breaking your SMS verification.
> A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there.
Not if they require something like hardware-backed remote attestation, and only accept such attestation from Google or Apple.
I'd love a practical Linux phone, and being able to run a deblobbed close-to-mainline kernel on a new-ish phone would help with that, but that doesn't really solve the most user-facing problem of mobile phones, the ecosystem lockdown.
And FSF has a history of creating important OS level software.
Like they have been doing for Desktop Linux?
And I feel like it undermines any effort to make free, featureful applications if the hardware itself can't be trusted.
You can trust hardware and software that's easy to inspect.
If you can't be sure what's going on and unable to inspect or debug the hardware and software, how can you trust it's doing what you want?
Proprietary hardware and software is already known to work against the interests of the user. Not knowing exactly what's going on is being taken advantage of at large scale.
Let's put it this way: if you can choose between making your own lasagna with a good recipe vs ready-made microwave lasagna. What would you choose? How about your suit? And would you trust an open known to work well pacemaker vs the latest Motorola or Samsung pacemaker? Would you rather verify the device independently or pay up for an SLA?
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 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 files? So what if apps could use that to leak user location data, I need that ability so I can tell if it's a picture of a bird"
For sensitive information - such as financial transactions - the rewards for bad actors are simply too high to trust any device which has been rooted. The banks - who are generally on the hook if something goes wrong, or at least have to pay a lot of lawyers to get off the hook - are not interested in moral arguments, they want a risk-reduced environment or no app for you - as is their right.
> For sensitive information - such as financial transactions - the rewards for bad actors are simply too high to trust any device which has been rooted
In practice, that just means you trust a Chinese black box Android ROM from a random manufacturer, but not a fresh Lineage OS. To run some banking apps there, one has to root it and install all kinds of crap to hide the fact that your phone is running an OS you actually can trust.
I don't think it's right, I don't think non-manufacturer provided ROMs are a real danger in practice, or rooted phones, and I think this is all just security theater and an excuse to control what people do on their own devices.
> The banks - who are generally on the hook if something goes wrong, or at least have to pay a lot of lawyers to get off the hook - are not interested in moral arguments, they want a risk-reduced environment or no app for you - as is their right.
If they pay for the phone and ship it to you then I agree. Otherwise, they have an obligation to serve their community (part of their banking charter) and that may include meeting their customers where they are, rather than offering an app with unreasonable usage requirements.
No charter requires allowing access from any device. The charters don't even require banks to be open during hours most of their customers are off work.
The charters aren't that specific (nor should they be). But they do oblige the banks to serve their customers to a certain extent.
> 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 files? So what if apps could use that to leak user location data, I need that ability so I can tell if it's a picture of a bird"
Well, no. The objection isn't to sandboxing apps, but to sandboxing the user, as it were. On my laptop, I run my browser in a sandbox (eg. bubblewrap, though the implementation of choice shifts with time), but as the user I control that sandbox. Likewise, on my phone, I'm still quite happy that my apps have to ask for assorted permissions; it's just that I should be able to give permission to read my photos if I choose.
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.
That's not a good example. My bank issued a token device which scans their code, asks me my pin, prompts me what's going to happen and asks for confirmation. Then I can enter the digits to proceed.
This is reasonably secure. If you hijack my account, you still don't have the hardware device and the random secret that was set up between the device and the bank.
You need to actually hack into the bank itself to transfer my money elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I only access the bank with my own computers. That means I installed them and have root. Not a problem at all.
Not really.
If their security depends on enslaving the user, their security sucks.
Real security, be it your financial transactions or keeping your bird pictures safe, doesn't depend on any secret algorithm. Because it's secure.
The threat models aren't secret algorithms, they're apps reading the contents of the screen, stealing keystrokes, MITM attacks against 2FA, and much more.
Apple, Google and Microsoft created that problem.
I don't have this problem on my computers, they run free software. My wifes thinkpad runs free software. The friends I gave a computer with various GNU+Linux distros don't have this problem.
Add Google Chrome with its spammy extensions to the mix and they start getting problems.
So, things that can be exploited on a stock Pixel with no user root? This is a weird argument to make at the same time as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588594 is on the front page.
There’s no way I’d trust open source anyone with my health. And I am not sure there is one open known to work well project, let alone a pacemaker that couldn’t possibly be funded in the open source world. What open source hardware is actually more usable than the closed source alternative for most people?
Trusted to do what? Work against user's interests? Prevent user from even expressing their interests?
Should the app builder’s ability to “trust” that the hardware will protect them from the user supersede the user’s ability to be able to trust that the hardware will protect them from the app?
In other words, should the device be responsible to enforcing DRM (and more) against its owner?
There is one solution to this problem that many people reading this message can contribute to:
Make sure your app has a progressive web app version that has feature parity with the store apps. That way, the app will work on phones like the librephone, and, if Apple or Google decide to kick you off the store, you and your users have some recourse. As a bonus, it’s compatible with open source — users can modify the app and install it without jailbreaks, root or (for now) sideloading.
React Native supports this (and can mostly be bundled with electron for mac/win/linux support).
Are there other stacks people can recommend?
You are mixed up 3 different tech stacks: 1. React Native has nothing in common with web apps except JS runtime. It uses "native" widgets for Android and iOS. You need to add a new "native" runtime for your free OS. There are some third-party attempts to add mac/win/linux support, but they are not feature complete as officially supported platforms. Again, your free OS will be step behind. 2. Yes, you can write PWA with React (Web), but PWA still have many missing features which offered by platform APIs of Android and iOS. Your app will not be in "feature parity" with "native" app. Especially banking app. 3. Electron apps are integrated with desktop platform APIs, you cannot easily port Electron app to mobile. Every time big company with big investments wins.
What does a banking app need that a PWA can not provide?
Technically nothing.
In practice, banks will demand remote attestation of the environment the app is running in.
Does anyone have a recommendation for a good "Remote Attestation 101" tutorial? I'm trying to wrap my head around why someone couldn't just run an Android emulator to run your banking app or whatever. I mean there then must be hardware keys that are not present in the code, but then there must be a revocation method for compromised hardware keys, etc..
I have a react native app, and can compile it to pwa mode. It runs well in a browser.
99% of the code runs fine in electron to. Index.tsx is the main exception.
I’m not saying you can automatically run software for one of these targets across all three. I’m saying it’s straightforward to write portable software that works on all of them.
Also, I can’t think of any apps I use that require any platform-specific APIs at this point. Even if they did, the phone I want would be able to surface those APIs to pwas.
This won't help if Google/Apple/Microsoft roll out integrity checks for browsers, something which they have already suggested they want to do.
It won't just be them. I foresee Cloudflare and other CDNs offering a free checkbox: [] Require age of majority verified user
And it will in turn depend on Secure Attestation, Web Credentials, and other recent W3C work to provide proof that you're the registered owner, age of majority and verified by thumbprint or other biometrics, running an unmodified device. Your ID might be escrowed with your OS vendor, email provider, bank, ISP, or even Twitter/X, who knows. Either way, as an end user you'll be mollified that you don't have to provide your ID to the adult site, and the adult site will be happy that they don't have to implement any of this themselves.
And, of course, this will mean that an intelligence service could have ironclad proof of exactly what person visits what website, effectively killing a lot of online anonymity.
You’re probably 100% right and it’s honestly heartbreaking.
Time to donate to the EFF and FSF I guess…
Also, time to switch back to firefox, and turn off the DRM crap.
I get warnings from some sites (like radio stations) that DRM is required for the page, but haven’t noticed any breakage.
Using them in that mode adds signal to their web server logs saying that forcing DRM will break their site.
Everyone that cares about this stuff should be doing this.
(And, no, firefox isn’t broken. Also, Firefox doesn’t include the pile of dark patterns and mandatory google spam that chrome does.)
Firefox 100%!
Absolutely re: sending a message.
Using Chrome feels creepy, like the Google marketing team is watching me type or something. And risking the future of the open internet.
That sounds awful.
It's something they've already done, they just aren't being public about it yet. Look up the X-Browser-Validation header.
...and packaging my app as a PWA is going to help with cantankerous bank/ditigal-id apps, how, exactly?
Momentum.
It becomes much harder to force attestation on people if there's a significant user base that runs alternative operating systems.
I agree, but unfortunately I think the chances of that are just about zero. The reality is that the vast, vast majority of people don't care about software freedom. They care about the flashy marketing features in the newest iPhone (and competitors). I wish it were otherwise, but alas. Heck, you can't even get people to care about their physical freedom most of the time, let alone their digital life. It's hard to see this effort taking off as a result.
Do you really NEED to be forced to attest if you can make your phone look like any damn PC using a browser?
My bank is migrating online banking to an app-only platform. I could see attestation following very shortly afterwards.
These days browsers are becoming increasingly distrusted. My bank logs my browser out after 30 minutes inactivity and then to log back in I have to confirm the login on my phone.
That… seems reasonable? My bank does that with their website and their mobile app. I was able to setup 2fa using a totp app, so i don’t rely on sms for that part
It is given the environment. But it does highlight the poor security of desktop browsers where they are only trusted to do anything when a phone app approves it. While the phone app is considered secure enough to just stay logged in perpetually without any external confirmation.
To hack the banks app you have to find an exploit in iOS or Android which would allow you to read the other apps private storage, which is borderline impossible now. To hack the banks website you just have to buy some random browser extension and add malware to it, or break into someones NPM account and distribute it there, or any number of ways to run code on someone else's computer. Something very achievable by an individual.
> But it does highlight the poor security of desktop browsers where they are only trusted to do anything when a phone app approves it.
Does it? The browser doesn't do anything, the person sitting at the computer where the browser is running is what performs the actions. The reauthentication and 2fa is meant to authenticate and authorize the user, not the browser.
The attack vector of someone else using your phone using an app that doesn't require (re)authentication is independent of the browser or the app itself being trusted. That your bank doesn't periodically require some kind of re-authentication for their app is a security hole, but because the device could fall into the wrong hands, not because the code/app/browser used to access it isn't trusted.
That is true. I guess one of the main differences is the bank app can run a faceid check when you open the app and before you make a transaction while websites don't have access to these apis. So they are forced to make you approve the action via your phone.
Every banking phone app I've used auto-logouts after being idle or unused for a bit, and my primary bank's app requires 2fa using an app that exists on the same device -- a second factor that secures nothing. They probably are not explicitly considering the phone more secure than a computer, but rather a good 80% of this is security theater or a checkbox on some baseline security checklist that was implemented without really understanding what the implications, for usability and security, were going to be.
> 2fa using an app that exists on the same device -- a second factor that secures nothing
2FA on the same device secures against your login credentials becoming known to another party, e.g. by fishing, password reuse, database leaks, etc., which are real threats. It is not meant to protect against someone being in possession or full control of your unlocked device, which is of course also a real threat, though possibly less common.
> 2fa using an app that exists on the same device -- a second factor that secures nothing
If I steal your device, and you didn’t have faceid, I have both factors. But if I steal your password, or find it in a leak of another site because like most people you re-use passwords, then I only have one factor. It still provides a fair bit of security because of that.
It's not reasonable at all.
Could you elaborate on what part you find un-reasonable, and why?
This isn't the browser not being trusted, it's access to the device the browser runs on. Forcing logout when idle, and authenticating again, is good in general to avoid leaving something accessible when walking away from it, even if it's a home computer that is otherwise "secured".
This seems desirable? Is your phone the only 2FA available?
webauthn cares about the strength of the authenticators used. Mobile has standard libraries for biometrics and secure enclaves. This is less common on desktops and laptops. Your bank may offer the ability to enroll a yubikey or similar.
I can’t tap my PC to buy a burrito at Chipotle.
So you pay more money and also give up your privacy for what you could pay cash for. I don't think you're the target market for this phone.
I pay less money for my burrito than I would with cash, but the reason I use my phone is convenience, not cost.
> I don't think you're the target market for this phone.
My comment is downstream of the entertaining of a possibility of:
> a significant user base that runs alternative operating systems
... which isn't going to happen if you ask your users to give up commonly used features. It will forever be a niche project, at best.
And there are still folks who don't use ad blockers.
This sounds like a challenge to me.
It’s actually super easy and not a challenge. The lowest tech way to do it would be the tape a cc with tap functionality to the inside of a laptop.
what a phenomenal comment, thank you for the laugh
I took "tap to pay" being clicking on Order in an app; and I have certainly made a "online order" from inside the Chipotle, on their wifi with my laptop (usually because walking to the counter would cost more because of stupid promotions).
It makes more sense that they're referring to Apple Pay or similar shenanigans (which itself is more annoying than a credit card, to be honest, Face ID goes wrong or the double click closes the wallet app instead of authenticating way too many times, especially if you're trying to do it one-handed).
I can tap my debit card to buy a burrito, no apps required on my end.
You seem to be part of the problem. As long as people like you are happy to run spyware on their phones for the sake of convenience or a meager discount, companies will be empowered to make such software and devices a requirement.
Do you think the same for using credit cards in general or is using the phone somehow worse?
I use cash whenever possible, but carrying cash for larger transactions has its own risks and those risks need to be balanced against the privacy benefits it offers. The way I see it, carrying a credit card in addition to my phone when I might need it is a minor inconvenience relative to that of allowing Google complete control over my phone.
Credit cards have become mainly a way for the banks and visa/mc to use the customer to strong arm money out of the business.
Get 3% and rebate some to the customer. For the convenience.
It’s kind of sad, really.
I am all in favor of ways to strong-arm money out of businesses --- they seem to be doing quite well at the expense of customers.
My bank doesn't let me do anything in the browser without 2FA, and the only 2FA they offer is their smartphone app.
My other bank offers 2FA via chip reader as an alternative. I guess that's somewhat viable for an alternative phone OS, if you want to carry the reader around with you
That might just be European banks though
That could be nice on the Librem 5 which has an integrated smartcard reader.
Some banks require app confirmation for PC-initiated transactions, using play integrity requiring apps. Cause security, you know.
I think it's time to look for a new bank.
In my country we have a large religious community that eschews smartphones. Due to this no company or government agency requires a smartphone for service.
This is a very good thing. I don't think many people here on HN reject technology, but sometimes no technology is better than one that is not controlled by the user.
No it isn't.
They just use an SMS code instead which is not secure at all.
choosing a wrong alternative does not make mandating spyphones good.
why not distribute hw tokens for purposes like this? it has the least flaws IMO.
would you mind reveal which community and country is this? maybe i can ask them to lobby in my area too...
It's the religious Jews in Israel.
It's because it's way easier to install malware on PC than mobile. None of us are immune either. In recent times there has been malware distributed by common NPM packages as well as game mods. Every NPM package you install has the ability to steal your browser session tokens and the only thing stopping the attacker from actually logging in and spending your money is the fact it has to be confirmed on your phone.
Choosing between a risk of that and preinstalled non-removable malware in every phone? Tough one, I know.
That doesn't require a bank approved app - we already have authentication mechanisms that are standardized.
People do proprietary bullshit because they want to do proprietary bullshit. Anything else is made up.
What kind of transactions require this? Normal bank transactions don't, right?
Fraud prevention on my primary transaction account requires 2FA for every transfer.
The only supported 2FA is the bank's own dedicated 2FA app.
So if you buy something on Amazon with your debit card you have to authorize it?
Depends on the bank's policies. Currently it tends to be when you transfer to a new destination and/or above a certain amount. I could certainly imagine a bank requiring it for every PC-initiated transaction as and when they reach a point where most normie customers are using their app.
"Every PC-initiated transaction" doesn't make sense to me. What type are transactions are you talking about?
> What type are transactions are you talking about?
Bank transfers and I guess direct debit authorisations (if your bank requires you to confirm those) and reauthorisation/confirmation of card payments that were blocked by the bank's fraud detection. I think those are the only kinds of transactions one would ever use a PC for? I mean for me most of my day-to-day transactions are me paying by debit card in a shop, but you can't do that on a PC in the first place; pretty much everything else I do on my PC.
Do you have to authorize those day-to-day transactions with your debit card on your phone every time?
No. Only to unblock when they get blocked/flagged as fraud (tends to happen for large transactions like plane tickets or buying a bunch of furniture), and even then I currently have the option of authorizing via the web browser (and I think also via phone call).
But sending a bank transfer is also a fairly common day-to-day transaction that I do a couple of times a month (and is the only way to pay for some government services like tax certificates short of visiting the tax office in person). Authorising a new direct debit happens occasionally (joined a gym, changed my utility provider, got a new credit card, that kind of thing).
My brokerages require it every time I login from a computer. My bank will require it if it can't find a cookie from a previous login session. Occasionally, my bank will require it seemingly randomly since I usually log in at least once a week from my laptop yet every couple of months or so I have to reconfirm on the app or another secondary method.
What are the other secondary methods?
Transfer of more than a set amount between even your own accounts in different banks.
Between your own accounts is the main use-case because you typically can't transfer between different banks.
> you typically can't transfer between different banks
WTF? What kind of shitty banking system are you using?
Wells Fargo said to do it I had to use Zelle.
AFAIK Zelle is something US banks got together and set up on their own because the government didn't. So a Zelle transfer is the US equivalent of a SEPA transfer.
Wow. You guys really need better banking regulation.
Websites are starting to make use of passkeys and TPM stuff on the device for workflows where money is involved.
Indeed, binary blobs are not much of a problem; it's anti-user "security" that has to be attacked. Otherwise we'll end up with user-hostile systems that we can see the source code of but can't modify, in contrast to systems that we can't see the source code of but can modify. The Windows modding scene of the late 90s/early 2000s is a good example of the latter (and I've joked that every power user was a novice reverse-engineer), while Android is turning out to be a good example of the former.
Stallman had a good idea for free (as in freedom) software, but then "missed the forest for the trees" by focusing on the source code.
>Stallman had a good idea for free (as in freedom) software, but then "missed the forest for the trees" by focusing on the source code.
RMS is afraid of trees!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28419139
> 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?
What does it matter if you can use any OS you want if your phone is filled with SoCs which are bugged and backdoored by the state and/or who knows who else? The reality is that we need both free hardware and free software. I can always tell my bank to fuck off and move my accounts to one that gives me freedom to use the mobile OS of my choosing, and if there isn't a single bank on earth willing to do that I can always simply refuse to use my cell phone for banking.
I'd much rather keep the phone I control and trust while limiting myself to only having the options of a desktop PC, a laptop, an ATM, a phone call, a drive thru, and walking into my bank's closest branch when interacting with my bank. Not being able to also stab my finger at a cell phone screen to check my balance isn't really that big of a deal.
Safe hardware is super difficult
The only project I know of that really actively addressing the end to end problem is Bunnie Huang's precursor.
Work seems to be going on low-key: https://github.com/betrusted-io/xous-core
> What does it matter if you can use any OS you want if your phone is filled with SoCs which are bugged and backdoored by the state and/or who knows who else?
Perhaps. But how does this effort from the FSF do anything to solve that? They are (as far as I can tell) producing firmware, not hardware. If the hardware manufacturers are working with the government or whomever to spy on you, they will just not use the FSF firmware in that case.
Well you're partially right. After all, the "big tech approved phone OS" is actually Linux, so just having a free OS isn't enough to prevent it from being co-opted and turned into a locked-down platform.
But the partially wrong part is, we can make our own platform. PCs let you install and run any software you want, because it's an open platform. If we make an open platform smartphone that can compete on features with the closed behemoths, and that then becomes popular enough, then banks may offer apps on that.
But this is tricky too. Linux already has issues getting official support from corporations. We'd need our open platform to be compatible with the closed ones, so that it's easy for banks to run their apps on our open platform. There are already ways around this, like virtual machines to run Android, or other methods. But the closed behemoths may try and end-run around this, like DRM. So we'll still need to advocate for our rights and compatibility.
> so just having a free OS isn't enough to prevent it
They have a free kernel not a free OS. Them not having a free OS is precisely what is the issue here.
Get a big tech second phone. Cheapest available. Just perform the needed tasks and use your Libre phone for everything else.
Does anyone remember having a copy of internet explorer that the bank required (or chrome these days) but using firefox for everything else? Apply that concept to a phone.
For people without a viable alternative such as transferring their funds to a bank that does not require Google/Apple certified devices, this seems to be the way. The second phone does not even need to have a SIM card in it, except perhaps during set up. That phone does not leave home and is ideally be powered off with its battery removed when not in use. Everything else can be done on a free device, ideally using FOSS apps. Ideally again, this means no Facebook, no Whatsapp, no IoT crapware.
Luckily, here in the U.S. this is still possible. I run Graphene on a Pixel without Play Store compatibility layer and everything just works. Most of my apps come from F-Droid, with the notable exception of Whatsapp, for which a standalone APK is available. Unfortunately, it is proving difficult to get rid of Whatsapp entirely because of friends and family.
Yup. Right now that's something running graphene for me. I'd prefer full linux but the other options don't seem viable yet to me. When I tried the pine phone a few years ago its battery life was in the 3-5 hours range if I used the phone which is not sufficient.
Some banking apps require relatively new OS, so if you have an old phone with e.g. Android 8 and you can't upgrade (Android 9 removes certain important features), you are out of luck.
But then I would need to constantly charge two phones and keep two phones in my pocket all the time because I never know when I would need to do those things on the go.
I recently added a second phone for secure comms (Graphene). The biggest hassle turned out to be moving data between them. For that I settled on running my own Matrix server.
You check your banking apps multiple times each day with the frequency and unpredictability expected from messaging apps?
If not that frequently or unpredictably then you could just plan to use your laptop for banking some time during the day.
> You check your banking apps multiple times each day with the frequency and unpredictability expected from messaging apps?
I almost do, yes. Life's complicated, I use several bank and credit card services a day. I'm not at home at suitable times for my banking needs. And payments for purchases sometimes require confirmation in real time via phone app.
> If not that frequently or unpredictably then you could just plan to use your laptop for banking some time during the day.
I used to do that years ago back when it was an option.. But these days, 3 banks I use (two for business) require using their mobile app to authenticate login on a laptop browser. There's no other option.
One of the card apps I have to use often won't even run when Android developer mode is enabled, which is quite annoying.
I hope all the things you mention never become mandatory some day because I currently use my phone for voice and text only. Sooner than later I plan to get rid of my phone all together. I'm gonna surprise the phone company and get a land line. That means any online service that uses SMS/text to verify me will fail.
If you're being serious, you're in for a rude awakening. POTS lines are dead and being replaced with VOIP and VoIP to pots modems on the premise. lots of cities have already started to grub the copper out and replaced it a long time ago with fiber.
I get what you are saying but POTS in my location is still copper. I know because I dug it up when putting in a cattle guard. I will have to splice it back together and run it somewhere other than under my driveway which I had paved. 811 marked it as disco/not-in-use. The telco accidentally leaked their plans to run fiber everywhere so I might wait for them to do that. If it ends up being VoIP then maybe I would still have SMS capability for poor mans 2FA? Maybe the competition will drive the cost of my existing fiber down. To userbinator's point the end result will be no more options to install applications. It would just be a phone. I would be back to good old fashioned NSA voice monitoring.
Changing the implementation but not the interface is exactly the point. It doesn't matter how it's delivered; it's just a phone line for voice calls.
Most importantly is to continue supporting web browser access and open web protocols. Then anyone with a web browser and device can use all the apps.
Exactly. A simple phone that runs a browser I can trust that's also capable of running web-based apps is all I need. I already avoid running apps on my iphone whenever possible.
The phone I really want is as uncomplicated and open as possible and beholden to no corporate economic interests or privacy invasions.
Now that I'm retired I'm looking for a project to immerse myself in. This sounds like just the ticket.
It depends on what definition of "uncomplicated" you'll assume, but that's pretty much how I perceive my Librem 5. It's fairly inspectable and relatively easy to understand as a computing device - no weird stuff like hundreds of disk partitions that you can't touch without risking bricking the phone like on Qualcomm devices, but a fairly regular GNU/Linux installation with well-defined boundaries on what's open and what's not - and it runs web apps pretty well. I have things like my bank, public transit planner, ride-hailing, webmail, RSS reader, Matrix client, package delivery status, even Facebook & Messenger for the handful of people that can still be only reached there - all "installed" as web apps using Epiphany (aka GNOME Web). Some of them required a bit of fiddling to discover which user-agent leads to a usable experience, but the results have been pretty good so far. In case I really need to run some Android app for some reason, I can boot Waydroid up and launch it there, though I use it very rarely. No corporate economic interests, no privacy invasions, no invasive notifications or ads, it simply works the way I want it to work. I just have to be careful with battery usage, but it's manageable :)
Actually "open" is a misnomer, maybe it was a decade ago but it's clear that Big G has an effective monopoly over browser(s), the web "standards", and is gradually making them more user-hostile.
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 me day by day, the primary reason I don't switch to Chrome is because it just doesn't integrate with macOS at all.
Also, rather than restore the previous state when I swipe to go back, it has to reload the page from scratch
I've encountered cases when both behaviours would've been desired (either use the cached version, or the latest version), so I think that's neither a point in favour nor against.
Well, Safari caches resources, it just doesn't seem to cache the actual runtime state of the page like Chrome does (look for bfcache). The bfcache article claims Safari and Firefox do it too, but I have both in front of me and no they don't (or it's not good enough).
I think real caching is superior because you can manually reload if you actually needed that, but you can't go in the other direction.
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.
Something Safari does is show a stale version of the webpage while the updated version is loading. I notice because none of my pointer movements take effect until the page finishes loading again. I'm not sure if Firefox does this too.
Mozilla is absolutely asleep at the wheel (and have arguably already swerved off the road and hit a tree) and Apple aren't any better than Google in terms of wanting to lock down the web.
Yeah... Corporations and governments are starting to push remote attestation. There'll be little point to a free computer if it gets us denied service everywhere. At this point we're gonna end up marginalized, like second class citizens of society.
> There'll be little point to a free computer if it gets us denied service everywhere. At this point we're gonna end up marginalized, like second class citizens of society.
Given the apparent trajectory of the corporate/government model of organizing society, it seems like they're going to be the ones that will be second-class citizens.
The mere fact such phone exist could be enough argument for pushing back, for ex. hurtful legislations.
People tend to see current world as carved in stone, like it is not going to change. It is, still not easy but, much easier to ask government not to mandate Windows/MacOS only program for essential task, because of couple of users of other systems, rather than asking to imagine that in future there might be other systems.
Funny that bank software needs approved phone, but runs absolutely fine in the browser. That to me sounds like collusion - something that regulators should look at. There is absolutely no need for banking app to require "legitimate" Android or other operating system.
Increasingly, browser-based online banking requires authentication with a proprietary smartphone app, where it used to accept other forms of 2FA
As terrible as proprietary app 2fa is, it still beats the tar out of SMS or email 2fa, security-wise. I don't get why my bank, who used to be pretty cutting edge, never implemented TOTP or passkeys...
Use the website. I’ve never seen a bank where a mobile app is the only option for remote access. If my bank did that, I’d switch banks.
UBS bank mandates their "Secure Access" app as second factor even when logging in from a desktop. They used to allow the smart card reader for existing customers that had it as a work around for a few years but they disabled that.
Also many websites are making it remarkably hard to not use the app if they even remotely sense you're not on an actual PC. FB and LinkedIn aren't banks but prime examples.
Then don't be a sheep and don't use Facebook or LinkedIn. They are notorious mass surveillance networks.
Good reason to stop using that bank.
I like my credit union.
Oh, and of course the stock app will refuse to run on rooted (or sometimes even just not widely used) phones.
To be clear I'm not saying that alternatives don't exist now. But it's a worrying trend that big businesses, and even governments in some cases, are moving away from such alternatives being available. Look for example at the proposed age verification scheme in the EU, where they don't plan to make a version you can use on a desktop (and even for mobile devices require you use a vendor-attested device). Sure, right now it's just for looking at porn. But it seems to me that once that settles, it won't be long (a decade or two) before you start to see government IDs require a similar mobile app. That's the kind of thing I fear happening soon.
Monzo bank in the UK doesn't have a web access (apart from very basic page where you can block your card and do nothing else, not even see your balance). They also retired support for older Android phones, so if you happen to use it on an old phone, you are out of banking. I, for security, refuse to install bank apps on my phone that I carry, but I have them on a separate phone that I have in safe place.
They more and more force you into 2FA through banking app
Every bank i’ve used (2, so ymmv) allowed 2fa using a totp app, they just don’t make that choice obvious you have to dig around in the settings
Here in SE Asia (in my country at least) you're lucky if they even offer you SMS 2FA (and even then, only for cash withdrawal from ATMs), because otherwise its just using PIN or biometrics without any kind of second factor auth.
I'm starting to see banks retire their web sites and push the app. It's likely that in 5 years most banks will only offer apps.
In SE Asia, most banks I've used no longer offer any services other than through their app.
What about WhatsApp?
I don't follow.. are you asking if WhatsApp offers some alternative to banking services? It doesn't.
> are you asking if WhatsApp offers some alternative to banking services? It doesn't
Indian banks provide their full suite of services through WhatsApp. I have opened and closed accounts, completed KYC and authorised transfers through it.
This was a problem during the early 2000s when Windows and Internet Explorer were utterly dominant. Some banks, government services, and other essential websites used ActiveX controls, preventing access by non-Windows users. I remember during my senior year of high school being unable to fill out a college financial aid application circa late 2004 or early 2005 on my PC running FreeBSD and Firefox; I needed to use Windows and Internet Explorer.
I remember the stagnation of Internet Explorer combined with increased awareness of security exploits in Windows and Internet Explorer led to the rise of Mozilla Firefox and (to a lesser extent) increased marketshare for the Mac. This, combined with the arrival of smartphones around 2007, put pressure on organizations to make their Web sites accessible to a wider range of browsers instead of just IE.
Perhaps if we had a critical mass of people using phones with FOSS software, this would be enough for banks and other organizations to consider people who don’t use Apple/Google products.
The challenge, though, is getting that critical mass. Firefox benefitted from Microsoft’s fumbles in the 2000s. It’s going to be hard for a FOSS project to compete head-on against Apple and Google.
I agree that FSF and similar groups should be focusing efforts on influencing government policy at least as much as on software. The problem is that in practice, you’ll get a bunch of people who are erstwhile free software supporters, shouting back that the FSF should “stay n their lane” and stay out of politics (missing the point that in life, everything is politics).
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.
you have to start somewhere, and with Goggle closing Android to non-approved apps this seems like the right move.
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.
i think the best solution to this would be some sort of docker-project for people to remotely access a device hooked up to a raspberry pi or something at home via adb via https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy as "natively" as possible.
I agree, and I've done similar to this for mobile banking successfully. This is the way :)
However, I expect at some point they'll insist on biometric authentication.
That'd exclude people who can't use the biometrics. But one bank (Revolut) told me that they're dropping customers who don't have a passport or driving license in the UK, for KYC reasons that they said they were required to follow, despite there being a large number of people without either.
So I expect banks to have no problem excluding <x% of people in a discriminatory way, if they can find an excuse, eventually.
In an emergency, can't you call your bank over the phone? Do you depend on it still if you have a Computer?
No, with some banks you can't.
I tried calling Starling Bank in the UK when my phone screen stopped working. I assumed they would have basic phone banking service.
They told me no. The only service they could provide over the phone was registering a new device to resume access to bank services via their mobile app.
Although they have a web banking service, which can he used on a desktop, that requires authentication via the mobile app too. It's not TOTP, it's their own thing.
As I needed to make a transaction, I had no choice but to buy a new phone in a hurry.to do it.
Several people suggest switching banks and credit card services, but I've found that not so easy. I have accounts with several banks (some for business), and 3 of them require use of their mobile app. Most credit card services I use also require use of their app. Some have websites that hand you over to the app at some point in the flow.
> 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?
Log in to your bank over the internet, the normal way.
You can replace the banking system. Replacing the banking system does nothing if a single tech company can brick the phones of people using the replacement, or block it from launching.
If the government needs me to get a side phone for ID, I'll cross that bridge. For everyday use, I'm fine with having a "rogue" phone as my primary.
The next step will be for them to prevent you connecting to the cellular network.
Just tether through your shit phone
seconding this. more compatible with day-to-day life/apps means more adoption which I believe is a snowball effect.,
In that case, I will own a surveillance phone JUST for the government ID app, and put that into airplane mode almost all the time, except for the few times per month where I need that shitty app.
The rest of the time, I will use a free phone.
All the apps that I will not be able to use any more? Doesn't matter. I am now old and grumpy enough to realise that phones are utterly evil and actually useless. Give me a camera, Google Maps (or better a non-Google alternative), Signal and a browser, and I don't need anything else.
Banking might be the wrong example to choose from here since we discovered with cryptos how to handle money without governments
Banks and national id apps already work on GrapheneOS. Sometimes you just need to msg devs and ask them to use a different OS attestation method - see link 1. This battle is won already.
1.: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
Sorry, but no. Device attestation is another mechanism to track and ultimately exercise control over the user. It fundamentally goes against the freedom of choice. You want me to authenticate with multiple factors? Cool.. let me tell you which method I'm already using on all my other accounts and then tell me how to register that with your service. You want to "measure" my device? Okay, I'll take my business elsewhere..
The phone is the critical root identity anchor for most of the world now. And many countries outside of the west has already made the Sim card a root identity. Additionally to make it trustworthy (think Google wallet and digital wallets and so on) to work they cannot trust the end user because effectively you the user don't own your own identity. So that's why the phone has to be proprietary - so that it's secure element can be trusted in interactions with the state-big-tech nexus. I talked about my experience with this while attempting to cross borders in SEA. https://polykey.com/blog/architecting-anti-fragile-trust-at-...
Unfortunately, even if you could completely de-blob the kernel itself (and for many chipsets, that would require a considerable amount of reverse engineering work!), smartphones bear the Curse of the Modem.
In a modern smartphone, modem is often a part of the SoC itself - and it runs some of the biggest and fattest blobs you've ever seen.
This is the big barrier here, and unfortunately, it is legally impossible to open source.
In most countries, the spectrum that cell phone carriers use is licensed to the carrier, under the condition they only connect devices that are guaranteed to comply with the requirements of using that spectrum. The end user (i.e. the person with the phone) has no license to use the spectrum. So in order to get regulatory certification, basically every modem has to be locked down so that the end user cannot operate it in a way that would violate any rules or regulations for using that spectrum.
So basically, it's illegal to have open source modem firmware. At least, as long as cell phones are operating on spectrum that isn't open for public use.
Ultimately, if you want to open source a modem, you first need to build your own cell phone network.
this is the same thing with wifi. There are different channels and transmission power rules depending on country. Something you cannot change even if you are root or build your own kernel, as it's built in to the wifi hardware (eg. raspberry pi)
Part 15 is a lot more permissive, and it's unlicensed. But yeah, the device still has to be part 15 certified.
You can open source it. Unfortunately, "open source" doesn't mean "user is allowed to run his own code" nowadays.
theoretically, there is lte cbrs where spectrum not licensed.
Don't cbrs devices need to be part 96 certified? The spectrum might not be licensed but you still may need a certified device to legally use the spectrum. Which you could do, but that is a tall hill to climb for a FOSS enthusiast. And when you're done -- what network are you going to connect it to? A cheap SIM from the corner store is probably out of the question :)
looks like they need. but it still gives you more possibilities compared to usual spectrum. if there is enough coverage from SAS you (or FSF) can build your own cbrs network that will have open source modem/firmware (yet, still will have to comply with part96).
there are also all kind of open source lte/cbrs projects iirc
It's a fun thought exercise, but putting "part 96 certification" at the end of my build pipeline sounds pretty expensive. And building a physical cell phone network is stupidly capital intensive. Maybe there are some interesting small scale niches that this would be useful for. But as a daily driver cell phone, I don't think we're ever gonna have an open source modem, at least not until there are significant changes to the spectrum that's in use.
i didn't say that it's cheap. i said that it's possible.
Hopefully open mesh wifi will supplant cell phone networks anyway.
Haven't there been projects trying to do this since 802.11b? I think the last time I looked one of these mash networks up, there wasn't even decent coverage in the dense city I lived in.
One of the two processors (the ARM one) in the PinePhone modem runs a proprietary Linux distro, which can be replaced by a free distro. The code on the Hexagon processor can't be replaced yet though I think.
https://themodemdistro.com/ https://github.com/the-modem-distro/
Yeah, and it's the Hexagon mDSP that's the issue. It's basically THE modem. It has its own RTOS and runs the entire RF stack and whispers to all the other RF parts. The cores that run the Linux distro are just... there. For you to run Android on, normally.
PostmarketOS can run on some devices with almost no blobs - but there's no escaping the modem curse.
Not insurmountable, given the availability of srsRAN.
https://www.srsran.com/
But are you enough of a madman to port that onto an undocumented magic modem?
Yep, with DMA sometimes. I've heard this same thing on the Pinephone forums iirc during the early years.
I for one am up to the idea of breaking android off Google due to the same reasons of chrome - conflict of interest since Google is an advertising company.
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 type, whose entire boot process is miserably locked down from the very start. It is like a bicycle made from Mickey Mouse logo bolts where the spanners are proprietary and not for sale. The situation is just as ludicrous.
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.
Librephone could be successful in a few ways. Outright, as a device, but also as a carrot to bring open handheld hardware to enough people to drive political change (with a small-p, the politics of society, as well as politics of the big-p kind) such that iOS and Android would have to follow suit. With actual public policy Librephone could also end up being a stick: bringing about legislation that requires computers of any kind to be able to boot software of our choosing. Right-to-repair plus plus, if you will.
With enough Librephone devices in the right hands, either the market or the law will demand that we have the same openness and freedom to use our devices the same way we do commodity x86 hardware today. The same freedom imprisoned and exploited in the core of mine and your phone, right now.
> 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 born on the 386. But Apple? They've been doing their own thing since day 1; I can easily imagine a world where IBM never existed and the iPhone is unchanged.
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.
Oh, I agree that Darwin is, especially by way of NeXTSTEP but even independently since then, significantly derived from the BSDs (IIRC mostly FreeBSD, but also a chunk of NetBSD code got used to make it). I just think that that would have happened with or without the PC being around. In some parallel universe without IBM making the PC, the unix family still prospers, probably mostly on the 68000 family instead of x86, Apple does their own thing for a while, and then those lineages converge in Darwin just like in our universe.
There is a lot of work to do to reverse the trend of increasingly locked down computing devices, particularly on mobile.
But from scanning through this press release, this seems nothing more than the FSF doubling down on their failed RYF approach, which does absolutely nothing for user freedom. In fact it's a big negative for freedom, as it ties down resources that could be spent doing something useful in doing something completely pointless like putting firmwares in ROM and adding another chip to load the firmware.
The thing is, firmwares are here to stay. And firmwares that can be stored on the filesystem and loaded by the OS during driver initialization increases flexibility and reduces BOM cost. So that's what device manufacturers are going to do, and RYF will not have any effect on that.
Meta-commentary: At least within the HN community there seems to be a strong interest in a pursuit such as this, given that this is at the top of the front page, and has been for a little while, plus the first page has simultaneously contained these two stories:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45584498
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585869
It's heartening.
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.
OpenMoko had that more than a decade ago, there were a multitude of distros. I ran Debian with X11 and Enlightenment on it at one point. QtMoko was probably the best one for the Freerunner hardware though, much more suited to the small touchscreen.
Congratulations, you just invented the open web circa 2006.
Or FirefoxOS circa 2013.
i agree, except the web part.
Purism did a lot of work to build Phosh, based on Gnome, with GTK apps that had fluid layout. on a phone-size screen, the UI was suited for touch; but connect it to a screen and everything seamlessly switches to a standard Gnome UI.
i would rather see this get mainlined into Gnome, and for it to be common-practice to design desktop apps with a fluid layout that can adapt to phone screens.
> i would rather see this get mainlined into Gnome
This is exactly the plan of Purism, https://puri.sm/posts/how-to-be-upstream-first/
I'm rooting for the web because it's all plain text technologies. And UIs live high up in the stack that one benefits from quick feedback, and also isn't forced to use a low-level language to develop them. But I suppose there can be language bindings from Python etc.
This seems pretty relevant on the heels of yesterday's popular discussion on how "Free software Hasn't Won" [0] in terms of tools available to the average consumer.
Just because pieces are open-source (or "free software") doesn't mean the autonomy and capabilities we want are necessarily present in the overall system.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286
Interesting that they chose Android as a base and not one of the desktop-Linux-for-mobile ports like postmarketOS.
If they wouldn’t have then X years later there would have been first beta release and zero apps on it except for a calculator app, a notes app, a calendar app, and maybe a mail app developed by the core developer team. The post would have definitely reached the top of hn, so that’d be a plus.
If prior "Linux phone" projects have taught me, it's that "based on desktop Linux" is a great way to have a ton of apps that install just fine, but can't meaningfully be used.
Not even just "requires a mouse/keyboard", but a lot of things of the form "assumes a reasonable screen size", ...
Android already is mobile: making it better makes sense. Linux already runs fine on it: termux and things like NOMone desktop combined with allowing virtual memory and keep apps running like some brands (Blackview, Oukitel) allow, you are there a lot of the way. Then Android desktop support (again, many brands have something already but it is now in Android mainline it seems). I use an oukitel rt7 as my main daily driver: it is rooted. It has some quirks and of course is very far from open, but things works, -ish. I would spend far more time on contributing if we had an open choice(or at least working) here that supports the 5g. On other phones/tablets, it is the fingerprint sensors, 3d face camera, but also different 'niche' auxillaries that would get far more attention if you at least can start with something that is (mostly open) and works. If we have coverage for a bunch of devices with everything working, it will be more attractive to work on other/newer ones.
With Linux, you will need, as I have seen on my pine phone, way too much focus on just basic apps which still are not good compared to their android equivalent: spending time there is not spending time on hardware support...
It makes a lot of sense to me. There's a huge amount of work that's already been put into the Android ecosystem that can be used in a free software phone.
Trying to build a non-Android Linux phone that is competitive is just not practical at this point. It would require an enormous amount of funding.
It's the right decision: Android is mostly open source and works well. Not to mention that in real life, right now, people need access to certain apps as a firm requirement.
Have you seen the attempts of past "Linux phones"? Usability, performance and usually battery life were horrible and progress was also slow.
There have been comments about the race to support recent phones. I hope that Fairphone will looked at as a target device. It would be a good cultural fit and they don't have a yearly device cycle which should also help.
Inertia is a hell of a thing.
Seems like a smart decision to me since that's what everything phone related builds to as a lowest common denominator anyway.
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.
They don't want to repeat GNU/Hurd tragedy
yes, but it's probably the quickest path to market with a reasonably certain customer satisfaction.
Doesn't stop you on working from there once that milestone is reached.. I would certainly welcome more alternatives in light of the recently announced changes from do-no-evilG
App compatibility is a thing, you know.
I like postmarketOS, but it always felt to me more like a pet project than a real OS, for that reason.
waydroid
It's an incredible waste and an amazing example of how useless the FSF is today. Instead of supporting real Linux phones they're focusing on trying to degunk Android even more.
> It's an incredible waste
Funny, I would have used those exact words had they chosen anything BUT Android as their base.
All the other "freedom" Linux phones are failures (yes I'm sure fsflover will now chime in to but akshually). I know because I bought them all. They all have one thing in common: the software sucks.
And I don't even need apps. Just basic phone functionality (several Linux phones still can't do MMS), a web browser, and no crashes. Unfortunately no Linux phone has been able to give the to me yet. Whereas Android has been delivering for over a decade.
I think that supporting Android as a free platform is a sensible choice. Android has benefited from more than a decade of development by Google, Samsung, and others and provides a polished experience and thousands of apps people actually want to use (and many excellent FOSS options too). AOSP is already "free software" and starting from scratch with Linux would make very little sense at this point. The FSF is right to focus on what matters here, which is hardware on which to run free Android.
A fully degunked kernel that supports LineageOS with full hardware support is one that will also run PostmarketOS or similar.
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 postmarketOS.
LineageOS has huge problems since the mandatory eBPF requirements of late Android versions, which postmarketOS and its upstreamed kernel drivers could fix. GrapheneOS has huge problems because of Pixel devices, which LineageOS could help with.
We need a unification of this ecosystem because each on their own is hardly surviving on their own against the megacorporations.
"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.
> I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.
It rather depends on what that 1% is.
The low-level code is what's most important to be free. If you have free firmware and drivers and operating system but then you still have to run a Windows VM or WINE for an old proprietary app, you can only have problems when running that app.
If you have opaque blobs interacting with the hardware, they can crash the whole system, expose firmware-level security vulnerabilities with persistence and the blobs are specific to a kernel version so when the vendor stops providing updates, you're stuck with an obsolete kernel version with known security vulnerabilities. If anything needs to be free software, it's that.
> 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.
Android is "open source" but then the devices are Tivoized or you run into attestation failures if you actually want to run your own version of it. GitHub literally got bought out by Microsoft. These seem like legitimate concerns.
> I feel that free software sometimes obsesses over the 1% when the 99% of their objective is achieved.
Yes, that's what it means to have ideals.
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.
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.
You could perhaps say "Well then you shouldn't get in a war". But that isn't really under your control. If someone else decides they are in a war with you. You are in a war. It doesn't really matter whether you wanted to be in one or not.
I'm not at war with anybody though.
Good for you, but that has nothing to do with whether secrecy is necessary in a security context.
it does, however, point out that there's not been a valid security context listed where secrecy would be necessary.
Pull your head out of the sand my friend. There's murders, kidnappings, wars occurring around us every day.
which of these requires my government to not be transparent?
"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.
That doesn't actually mean that they're not correct.
too many false positives means you should reconsider what you call a false positive
> 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
[flagged]
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 "ethically pure"
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 on the desktop first?
Rockchip AFAIK doesn't have any. It boots with mainline u-boot, but it doesn't include any wifi or other radios.
It os definitely more open than most, thanks! I'm pretty sure it still has the masked boot rom before getting to the open bits. While the tpl and ddr are still blobs and might harbor naughtiness, people have at least figured out how to edit the blobs https://github.com/hbiyik/rkddr
U-boot for Rockchip builds it's own TPL. I'm using it right now. It can also use Rockchip's TPL, but that's optional, not the default. DDR training code is here:
https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/drivers/ram/roc...
Also, libreboot supports quite a bit of hardware. What binary blobs are left of you have one of those systems?
> 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.
How does the licensing affect firmware blobs?
They are also software that is licensed?
AFAIK you can use and reverse engineer the firmware blobs on any OS, free or not.
Reverse engineer? Probably. As long as there aren't patents involved. And that is what the librephone project aims to do, from what I understand.
But the binary blobs are protected by copyright, so you need a license to use them.
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!
You might have gotten lost on the steps involved in clean-room reverse engineering here?
>extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design
It's stage 1. Clean-room reverse engineering is about working with the nature of copyright, and classically goes roughly like this:
1. You set things up with a "contaminated" or "dirty" side team who have direct exposure to the IP in question, and a "clean" (or "virgin" is another older term) side team that are thoroughly firewalled. The clean side must only have devs who have never ever had any exposure to whatever it is you're trying to clean replicate [0].
2. The dirty side is in charge of producing a "fact sheet"/spec. That side absolutely extracts/disassembles or whatever else to get at the target, which is precisely what "contaminates" them. They are looking at copyrighted code. Then they use that research to a create a purely factual spec, which is then passed across the firewall to the clean side. This must be the only communication.
3. The clean side then uses that to write new code themselves that will handle state per the factual spec they've been given.
The reason it works is that (in the US) purely factual information cannot be copyrighted, there's no "sweat of the brow" doctrine or the like. Copyright, unlike patents, does not cover ideas or methods, it's about the creativity of the person in question. You can't copyright the mathematics of a function, of "when X input is received Y is output", or of general concepts. So if two (or more) people independently create works that happen to cover the exact same subject matter, but can prove they were fully independent, then it doesn't matter even if it happened to be literally identical (however improbable that would be). Each would have their own independent copyright on it.
So clean-room RE avoids all the legal snarls around "how close is this" in favor of the simple binary question of "did the team that wrote this RE'd code have any exposure whatsoever to copyrighted IP?" If the answer to that is "no" that's the end of any legal complaint, because by definition their output cannot be a derivative work. Software patents short circuit that, part of the many reasons they're evil, but as a practical matter the number of really fundamental hard to avoid ones is rapidly shrinking because it's 2025 and by 2005 a lot of the foundations had long since been done.
----
0: Which is not necessarily trivial to hire for, because the kind of person who has the kind of skills you need also is going to tend to enjoy hacking around and reverse engineering stuff for fun anyway increasing the chance they've managed to contaminate themselves.
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)
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).
That's not entirely true.
Most PostmarketOS devices start out using LineageOS kernels, and many are atill using those.
Why not use PostmarketOS kernels on LineageOS?
The ultimate goals are different, but cooperation on upstreaming kernel work would benefit both.
LineageOS kernels are AOSP downstream kernels, and PostmarketOS has expressly deprecated their use. LineageOS is now working on running their system on close-to-mainline kernels, as provided by PostmarketOS and most Linux distributions.
> 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.
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 engineering to get a fully open solution working. In a world with thousands of Fairphones and Pinephones, and billions of corporate smartphones, replacing the proprietary software needed to run those billions of corporate smartphones is a hell of a win for software freedom.
And are you really expecting the argument "open source loses" to be a real argument against a project by the Free Software Foundation? This is like asking a cancer charity why they don't endorse your preferred brand of cigarettes.
What the FSF is doing here isn't about maximizing your experience with your preferred custom ROM, it is about tearing down the proprietary software barriers that prevent the vast majority of smartphone users from fully owning the hardware they purchased. It fits perfectly with the FSF's goals.
> 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.
This type of semi-whataboutist comment appears at the top of most open source project announcements.
Once we live in a centrally planned utopia these projects will all be merged with each other and produce the perfect phone/operating system/smart watch.
This project is about reverse engineering the firmware blobs. It states that they do not want to create a distribution like postmarketOS or other projects do.
The listed distributions have already been created. The OP didn't suggest to create a distribution but to collaborate with existing ones not relying on the Google's OS.
Graphene and Lineage both rely on Google's OS, so this is not what the OP was saying.
Did you miss postmarketOS in the OP's post?
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.org/givingguide/v11/
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.
We are talking about the FSF here, not Apple. The former concentrate on the user freedom, not modern hardware or polished experience (which is a good thing).
We know that you will post something about Librem 5 so there is no need for anyone else to do it.
It’s amusing to me that whenever I see a submission about Linux phones, I start looking for the obligatory @fsflover comment.
No bad feelings, fsflover, keep up the good work. I also can’t wait to post on here from a libre phone.
> LineageOS has huge problems since the mandatory eBPF requirements of late Android versions
It's a mixed bag. The eBPF requirement makes it harder to support newer AOSP versions on very old downstream kernels (you now need a close-to-mainline port, like what pmOS aims to provide) but because it is a requirement, it will make it easier for newer devices to run a more up-to-date kernel starting from the available downstream sources.
You have a good point about things coming together, but open source often is a lot of design and development by committee, or interest.
Librephone appears to be taking existing linux approaches, and specifically reverse engineering the SoC blobs to be completely free. I may have mis read, but it doesn't appear they are building another android distro for android phones, as they already have done that in the past.
Just tried to learn the difference between these and it seems like:
- Graphene - For current devices only - An alternative for phones that are supported and updated by Google. Security Patches, etc.
- LineageOS - For devices while they're supported or may not be updated that often. Support can be sometime by community members.
- PostmarketOS - devices that no longer have a maintained Android version for it, can just become a linux computer. Mobile functionality doesn't necessarily.
Some phone chips overtime end up having a hardware security flaw that software can't fix.
I really enjoy using Android. Part of the issue is not all deices get timely security updates, even if they get monthly updates, the updates might be from 6 months ago. Google might release a security patch but sometimes it has to go through the device manufacturer, and maybe even the mobile company. Pixel / Android pure installs seem to improve this a bit, but it's hard to have complete trust.
Librem?
> 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 to them and now do you want to blame them for the results?
The diversity of projects were not and are not the problem. The problem is people that do nothing and only criticize.
> 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 while ignoring financial interest, basically abandoning users and businesses. There are how many billion smartphone users on Earth, and the FSF expects volunteer programmers and volunteer donations recruited on one of the worst websites I have ever seen to carry the load? Give me a break.
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 can totally sell Free Software"[1], which ignores the fact that without any restrictions on distribution/copying, the fair market value of said Free Software rapidly drops to ~$0. It's not a viable business model. Companies have built alternate business models around soliciting donations, or selling support or non-free add-ons to Free software, but selling Free Software itself (at least as the FSF defines it) doesn't actually work in practice. (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.)
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
> 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 won't bother removing the license checks, it's easy enough to pay, and far easier than donating.
It is not XWiki SAS's only business strategy nor the one that brings the most money, but still, that's not a possibility to discard too fast.
You can also find paid open source Android apps on the Play store, and people (individuals!) will totally pay for them even if you can have them for free from F-Droid, like OsmAnd+ [2] or Conversations [3].
[1] https://store.xwiki.com/
[2] https://osmand.net/
[3] https://conversations.im/
¹ I work for them
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 the Free Software equivalent of Microsoft or Google on donations.
That said, I think doing that with business software is a particularly interesting case because it allows low level employees to justify running a donation through the regular software purchasing process without raising too many eyebrows if they care to. I've seen a few other projects with similar models.
It's nothing like donations: people pay these extensions / apps like any other paid software. That's my point, actually.
In XWiki's case, we know it's not perceived like "I could be having it for free but I'll pay anyway because it's a nice thing to do".
We do explain that our stuff is open source to our customers though. It's a selling point.
In our case, admittedly, it helps that our target customers want our support anyway.
> before someone just undercuts you with a fork.
Absolutely, it is a risk to take into consideration. Now, maintaining a fork has costs too, and someone doing this would rely on continued maintenance and goodwill from the upstream vendor as well.
Downstream vendors actually have an incentive to keep good relationships with upstream, so they can share fixes and have some guarantee that whatever they base their business on keeps being maintained.
> 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.
The main reason Netflix is more convenient than piracy is that piracy is illegal. If The Pirate Bay was allowed to offer a $2/month unlimited movie streaming service with no legal repercussions, Netflix would be out of business.
Actually, piracy became rare exactly when Netflix became easy to use and not when the former became illegal (which it always was).
Hey don't discount the work that various actors did to make piracy less convenient as well. VPNs and upload caps, not to mention putting all the infrastructure and ops in place to force people to use them made piracy harder than it technically needs to be.
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.
The initial sale never has and never will be the issue with non free software; in fact, they can sometimes be acquired free of charge. I get your sentiment and I agree with you that some software can indeed be proprietary without being predatory or abusive.
I think there is an issue with your definition of "user freedom". What do you mean by it?
Stallman, when defining free software, does not bother with standards or terms: he relies on his own definition of what "user freedom" means and from there states that free software is software that is not restrictive of this freedom.
Free software simply does not restrict what the user can do with a program. It is not a matter of interest. People that choose a free license when they publish something (and respect the license's terms, obviously) are voluntarily letting go of their ability to restrict the user's usage of the program.
The issue I would have with "non-predatory" or "non-abusive" non-free software is that it does not allow me to fix problems I might have with the program. But this is only a problem I have. In other contexts, maybe a user needs to send (modified or otherwise) copies to other people of the software without being able to make sure the author agrees that this transaction is ok.
Fundamentally, non-free software restricts the user's freedom, even if it fully respects what the user would want to do. Similarly, a typewriter that can only output English text would restrict your freedom to type anything beyond English text (which is not something you would care about if you only wanted to write English).
That's the idea anyway. What do you think?
I think what GP means by "user freedom" is that the software acts in the interests of its users rather than the interests of its developers. Some proprietary software does do that, but there's an inherent conflict of interest there since the developer has a monopoly on the ability to control said software. Software that is open to user modification (which is how I would personally define Free Software) protects against this conflict somewhat by creating a free market for patches to the software, and free markets are much better at aligning with consumer interests than monopolies.
Stallman goes further than my preferred definition, insisting that Free Software must also be freely redistributable with no required payment. This cripples that very same market for patches by greatly limiting the resources available to fund it, and cripples the software itself if there's no big commercial interest backing it. The result is that Free Software is often not competitive with proprietary software, except when it does have a big commercial backer (Chromium, AOSP, etc) in which case that developer is often able to maintain a virtual monopoly on patches despite it theoretically being open to competition.
> Stallman goes further than my preferred definition, insisting that Free Software must also be freely redistributable with no required payment.
What do you mean? What would free software requiring redistribution payment look like? Say I send a copy of a free-as-in-freedom game that I may or may not have modified in some way to a friend or on a forum, should I pay its author(s) for this? How could I, for instance, commission someone to modify software if I want to change it when I don't have the skills to do so myself, in your definition of free software? I think a simpler definition, like Stallman's, is less restrictive of software modification.
Restricting how software is redistributed holds a great deal of power, especially when you remember the idea behind free software is that you get to have control over your software. Copyleft is such an example -- it is highly restrictive.
I get the financial issue one could have with free software as defined by Stallman; freeing the software you distribute is a difficult decision. Free software is advocated from the point of view of its users, who are ignorant to the difficulties one might face when developing and publishing software. If this is a decision you can make, it is kinder to your users to free the software you publish.
Side note: free software requires one to examine how they value commodities. Do you value the object itself, or the human time it took to make it? In a world where software is thought of as free by default, developers can be paid not per copy, but per patch. I believe such a world would be better for software quality because I agree with you that competitive markets are better at aligning with consumer interests than monopolies.
Most people have no interest in redistributing software, they only want to use it.
PREACH. Sorry. I felt heard and seen!
I prefer /e/OS to LineageOS because it includes sensible defaults (e.g. Maps app + MicroG with location providers and signature spoofing enabled) that are a pain to set up for yourself after flashing vanilla LineageOS.
/e/OS already partners with Fairphone, if you like that hardware: https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairpho...
I agree that PostmarketOS needs a lot more love, but it's very far from being a daily driver system today.
/e/ has extraordinarily poor privacy and security. Extremely delayed privacy and security patches including years of delays for kernel, driver and firmware updates or complete AOSP patches is not compatible with privacy.
/e/ rolls back privacy and security far more than LineageOS and /e/ includes their own invasive services. Murena services even send data to OpenAI without user consent.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... is a detailed post covering the lack of privacy and security of /e/ with a bunch of linked sources including other detailed posts by third party privacy and security researchers. It also touches on the lack of security of Fairphone hardware including end-of-life Linux kernel branches not getting LTS updates and delays for driver/firmware patches, but it's much worse with /e/.
You post something similar almost every time /e/OS is mentioned.
I recognize that GrapheneOS has a different threat model in mind (journalists, activists, etc.), but /e/OS is a big improvement over OEM Android for most regular people. I tend to agree with your linked article that for users happy to live in Apple's locked-down glass box, iOS is a more secure, more usable system than either Graphene or /e/OS.
/e/ isn't a safe option for regular people. It doesn't provide the most basic privacy and security patches or protections. Multiple years of important privacy and security patches being missing is terrible for a personal computer with tons of sensitive data. Replacing the stock OS on a Pixel 7 with an OS multiple years behind on important privacy/security patches and protections with different service privacy issues is not an overall privacy upgrade. /e/ has their own privacy invasive services including sending sensitive user data to third parties without consent and user tracking via unique identifiers.
/e/ claiming a voice-to-text service is private while it actually sends the audio data to OpenAI is not the approach of a privacy project. Falsely claiming the data sent to OpenAI is anonymized when it's brought up makes it worse. That's one representative example.
I didn't mention GrapheneOS in my reply above, but it's not aimed at a niche audience or specifically for people who need advanced protections as your claiming. It provides much broader app compatibility, stability and usability than /e/ despite their inaccurate claims about it. GrapheneOS is a privacy project providing both privacy protections and also security protections to avoid exploits compromising privacy. iOS is certainly far more private and secure than /e/. It's definitely less secure than GrapheneOS against remote attacks on browsers, messaging apps, etc. iOS having a more secure kernel than the current status quo of hardened Linux doesn't mean it's more secure overall.
I think your threat model is wildly backwards if you believe that average users are concerned about threats from bugs in old kernel versions. In all of your posts, you carelessly (or deliberately?) conflate privacy and security. This is the same shell game that Google themselves play in their marketing https://www.tomsguide.com/phones/google-pixel-phones/the-pix...
Your idea of a super-secure phone is a modern kernel with all the security patches running trusted, official signed Google Play spyware in a sandbox and all the apps collecting personal data in the same sandbox. There's an XKCD meme about this: https://xkcd.com/1200/ You are worrying about the printer drivers.
/e/ lacks privacy without taking exploits of unpatched security vulnerabilities into account due to having severe unpatched privacy vulnerabilities, lack of modern Android privacy protections and lack of important privacy features filling major gaps in Android privacy covered by iOS such as Contact Scopes and Storage Scopes. Some major gaps in privacy aren't covered by either Android or iOS such as a Sensors toggle, especially with how the sensors can be used to do rough recording of audio.
Taking advantage of privacy flaws in older versions of software is the norm and not treated as malware by most platforms, app stores, news sites or the public at large. Many widely used apps abuse privacy flaws in older Android versions. That happens both in the form of privacy bugs which were fixed in newer versions and weaknesses in the design addressed by newer OS versions. Only privacy patches for issues considered bugs which are assigned a High or Critical severity are backported. The severity is very subjective and they try to avoid adding a large number of backported patches since some OEMs struggle to keep up with it and adding more patches would make it harder. As an example, VPN leaks are only considered Low or Moderate severity issues by Android and don't get backported. Many other kinds of privacy issues are similarly only fixed for the latest OS releases. As another example, many important privacy improvements are not considered bug fixes at all and aren't candidates for being backported regardless of importance. Many privacy improvements require changing the APIs used by apps with new target API levels which can't be backported without breaking compatibility.
A large portion of the missing patches in /e/ we're referring to are privacy patches, not security patches. However, security patches are also needed to protect privacy. Many apps and services abuse the privacy vulnerabilities. The patches being referred to are a mix of both. A large subset are privacy patches, especially the Moderate and Low severity patches due to how they assign severity. Only certain particularly awful classes of privacy vulnerabilities can get considered High or Critical severity to be candidates for Android's backporting to older releases.
Apps exploiting security vulnerabilities to get code execution would be considered malware and is rare, but apps abusing many privacy flaws in older Android is the norm among mainstream apps. You're wrongly interpreting the regular stream of patches for vulnerabilities as only being for security issues when many are for privacy issues. With /e/, you aren't getting the bare minimum to protect privacy and security. Privacy also depends on security and is not an entirely separate thing as you're portraying it. We're not conflating them but rather they're very closely related. You're also disregarding privacy vulnerabilities and the steadily improving standard Android privacy protections.
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.
Why is eBPF a problem?
A lot of functionality of newer Android releases (Android/AOSP 13 and later) rely on eBPF [1] for both interception of process insights and sandboxing of processes. eBPF in a nutshell is a way to build kernel hooks, so that you can also disallow or intercept syscalls or kernel API calls that the Apps are executing behind the scenes.
eBPF was introduced with Kernel 4.14 officially (but partly long before that). Most LineageOS supported devices still rely on older kernels, the most range being around the Kernel 4.4 or 4.9 branches, which lack that eBPF functionality. The LineageOS maintainers were backporting a lot of things already, but that's the "hardcut of now unsupported legacy devices" that people are experiencing with their old phones.
The issue here is that upstream vendors (e.g. Fairphone, actually meaning upstream Qualcomm IoT) only maintain their outdated kernel versions, and never maintain them in the sense of updating their driver code into newer kernel releases. The drivers are always stuck in an outdated state of a feature frozen kernel.
I'm just making this specific example with the Fairphone because "5 to 8 years support" isn't what most people would think it is. It means "only the really critical security patches of old stuff gets backported" and does not mean "hey we migrated our old code to a new kernel and Android version".
For example, Fairphone 1, 2, 3, 3+ are all stuck in old kernels right now (4.9 being the latest backport for the FP3+) and are essentially not updatable because of this.
I don't try to blame Fairphone here, because other manufacturers are much much worse in this regard. Fairphone and Pixel are already the "as good as it can get" for third-party ROMs case.
I mentioned postmarketOS specifically, because they're trying to fix that by upstreaming the kernel drivers, so that Linux support of those devices will stay updated with newer kernel releases (hopefully).
[1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/bpf
> only maintain their outdated kernel versions, and never maintain them in the sense of updating their driver code into newer kernel releases
Just an aside, but this is one of the major downsides of monolithic kernels, and a case where microkernels would have had more consumer friendly upsides.
I don't think Android is really using eBPF for much. Last I remember they were loath to adding more things and they've definitely locked away the ability to load arbitrary new programs because they couldn't secure the attack surface it opened up.
I'm pretty sure they said they're partnering with everybody that they possibly can. I also don't know what you mean by "just partner with postmarketOS." It's basically a project to create a fully-free Android-compatible distribution (or rather the fully-free low-level elements that would support this), and postmarketOS is not Android. I also don't have any idea why you think that they wouldn't be talking to everybody who is reverse engineering phones to get OSes on them.
I really do not understand this comment at all. I don't understand the weird judgemental tone, and I don't understand that people have reacted to it like there is content there.
I agree about postmarketOS but eOS isn't the same as Lineageos, I used both and they are pretty different. eOS wants to have its own non-Google ecosystem which is a non-goal for Lineageos
That's just the unfortunate reality of free software. Free software is anarchy, and the only people who thrive in anarchy are the ones who band into fiefdoms, who then fight amongst each other and build mutually incompatible projects (often from the very same components) which are direct substitutes to each other.
There's tons of evidence of this with stuff like linux distros, desktop environments (each one MUST have its own sanctioned file manager, video player, music player etc, god forbid some godless charlatan come along and make its own).
The price of admission into these 'tribes' is the adoption of the local creed (libraries/HIG/coding style/whatever/not speaking out against the Dear Leader/Core Principles/local purity committee). As with other such despotic organizations, incompetence and laziness is tolerated, disloyalty is not.
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You're forgetting 1 tiny thing: the wjole AOSP ecosystem is running on volunteer dev time. It's much more difficult to organize and streamline vision / roadmap.
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.
> in terms of going out of their way to not use proprietary software.
Performative and an example of very self-defeating tactics that belie motivations other than actually accomplishing anything.
> they founded it
This is true, but it actually contributes to arguments that the FSF is full of crazies content to preach from the monastery of ascetic suffering rather than live in a world with lots of independence and strong open source.
> GrapheneOS has huge problems because of Pixel devices, which LineageOS could help with.
What are these "huge problems" caused by Pixel devices?
Probably that Google is dragging their feet releasing Pixel kernel and other source code. LineageOS has many years of experience getting a working system on top of bad or incomplete sources, including getting kernel source out of vendors in the first place.
> dragging their feet releasing Pixel kernel
Isn't it only the device tree, and therefore only affecting initial support for the Pixel 10?
Doesn't feel like a huge problem, though it makes it harder to support the Pixel 10.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925
I will never use GOS as long as it requires me to buy a Pixel, on principle, because it's made by Google. It's like having to buy a Microsoft Surface in order to use Linux.
You can use an older pixel, thus not really giving money to Google, and also preventing that phone from landing in a landfill. Without all that Google and carrier excess junk on board, an older phone is fast.
You can buy a new pixel, install GrapheneOS, and laugh thinking about how you're denying the enemy the OS level tracking they wanted with that device.
But you still support Google and the closed source Android ecosystem with that.
No, actually, you don't. And Android is not closed source. Google's add ons are.
When you buy a used phone, it's already been bought by someone. The profit is already in Google's hands. Loads of old phones are in drawers somewhere. Once Graphene is on it, it's faster, not bloated, and you don't need Google anything.
You could offset that by convincing others to use graphene, and by degoogling your device you’re also cutting off one of their other income streams
The reason why GrapheneOS only supports the Pixels is that the other manufacturers are not trying to get their shit together and release a phone that is reasonably secure. It's not that GrapheneOS supports Google, it's just that the other manufacturers are worse than Google.
If a major manufacturer released a good smartphone that GrapheneOS could support, they would get new users from the set of people who want GrapheneOS. I would gladly buy a non-Pixel as long as it can run GrapheneOS.
Which means that in a way, if you buy a Pixel and install GrapheneOS, you give more credibility to GrapheneOS, making it more interesting for a different manufacturer to consider supporting them.
PostmarketOS has never achieved proper support on any device so far.
Doesn't this count? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Purism_Librem5_(purism-li...
Looks like it is not. Unfortunately.
What's not proper about it?
At least camera and other sensors. It looks much better than other devices, though. What I meant is that compared to Android, the average user might not want a half-baked device.
I got an FP5, would not buy again.
Could you elaborate on why? This type of comment doesn't add any value.
We bought two FP5 with e/OS/ from Murena (for spouse and myself), and would buy again. Why wouldn't you?
I don't like how /e/OS claims everywhere that they support all those phones, when in all my experience they just can't keep up and I end up with phones that don't receive vendor firmware updates for 1+ year.
I considered purchasing it, but ultimately turned it down due to its size. What's the reason you're not liking it?
I like the size. I do not like the weight. I love the phone overall though. Love love. Good choice despite downsides.
I got a FP4, will definitely buy again.
Can you elaborate?
Did you read the article? They're not creating nor choosing an operating system for the librephone project. They're looking into reverse engineering the binary firmware blobs needed to achieve a fully free software distribution on a modern device. Afaik, this work will benefit all alternative OS projects for whatever devices they succeed with.
I guess maybe a good analogy would be like trying to port coreboot to a laptop.
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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.
> there are no commercial phones using postmarketOS with blobs to reverse engineer
This is false: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Purism_Librem5_(purism-li...
See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589096
> This is false
You can install postmarketOS on it (just as you can install lineageOS, etc on a Samsung galaxy, etc), but it ships with PureOS. "The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS" - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
The project is to reverse engineer proprietary blobs - so it makes sense to go where those blobs are and reverse to match the functionality that is exposed commercially instead of guessing at a subset for base implementation on a non-official OS?
> See also my other comment
It seems you are just as confused about this project as the OP, which is ironic given your name.
> but it ships with PureOS
Why does it matter? Yes, I would prefer that FSF collaborated with PureOS directly, but collaborating with postmarketOS also seems possible. There are enough blobs in Librem 5, which don't depend on the OS.
> which is ironic given your name
Indeed I'm quite surprised about the FSF actions lately.
> 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 other OS.
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.
> 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?
> Because they aren’t focusing on a specific piece of hardware…
How can you reverse engineer firmware without focusing on a specific piece of hardware? Firmware is tied to hardware, isn't it?
Clearly you are just trolling now.
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I wanted to mention that back then when Mozilla announced its FirefoxOS based devices with the "ZTE Open" as a developer device, I realized how broken the ecosystem actually is. The ZTE Open wasn't actually open source and you weren't even able to compile FirefoxOS completely, and only the Gaia (UI) parts could be flashed or changed. So much for open source as a branding, it was a pretty useless device in terms of development.
I realized that there will never be a vendor that actually open sources their firmware blobs. We need better legislation or a complete rewrite of our judicative system to fix this, which realistically is never going to happen.
It's an anti-model in their business world, given how contracts and licensing works from upstream ARM or NXP or MediaTek. It doesn't matter really where the vendor sources their chips from. They all have similar NDAs and contracts and royalty fees.
That's why I was so disappointed by my Librem phone, again, because they, again, promised that the NXP related firmware blobs were open sourced, which honestly was a very overpriced lie to begin with in comparison to the Pinephone devices that were sold at self-cost.
I have no idea how the FSF could recommend Librem devices, because they are literally just as free as every next door Qualcomm or Snapdragon chipset.
Are you talking about the Librem's blobs in modem/WiFi or something else?
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> The FSF is now under the leadership of a "Bachelor of Arts degree in Media and Culture and a Master of Arts in the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image" who probably hasn't written a line of code.
This is an exceptionally poor argument.
1. Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
2. Your "probably" here is too big of an assumption and of not much consequence. I have a degree in humanities, do not work in IT and have contributed code to Free Software.
3. You somehow imply that formal education affects _leadership_ in a _rights_ organization and a technical one would be preferable. That's a long shot.
Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following, you're providing a counterexample.
> Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
Programmers understand software ecosystems, of which free software is just a subset. I also see a lot of programmers advocating leaderships and other non-technical skills generally. If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
> Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following
The FSF has circular logic all throughout their ideology. They only want to argue if you let them frame the conversation with their own conclusions along with a full deconstruction of views they didn't come up with, like open source, which they explicitly work to discredit and do not represent. It is little wonder that their following is not wide nor strong because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity. They are eclipsed by the EFF and several other organizations built around open source applications in terms of fund raising at this point. Don't listen to me. Just go look at some financials. You'll see how little they represent these days.
> Programmers understand software ecosystems…
Some do, some don't and happily (or begrudgingly but willingly) contribute to building a hostile larger ecosystem.
> …of which free software is just a subset.
We're mostly talking about the movement here, but OK. Don't see what's your point here.
> If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
Of course, self-interest. Mostly the need to minimize work/pay and improve hiring or promotional perspectives.
> ...because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity
That's a great argument as it applies equally to uncommunicative, autocratic, self-absorbed, deceptive entities as well as to principled, unswayed and self-consistent ones.
I'm not arguing FSF is a pinnacle of leadership, au contraire.
In free software those who write code decide what is done and nobody else matters in the end.
This probably explains a lot of the problem then. IME those who are good at writing code are pretty bad at the social parts of running an organization.
This isn't a dig, I've known and admired quite a few people who were absolute geniuses at hardware and/OR software, real engineers but they couldn't even manage a group lunch. It's just an entirely different skillset.
Like OpenBSD Theo de Raadt who was know to be quite toxic. But in the end its project is still going and highly praised after 30 years.
Let me frame it another way:
Software is like soccer, big tech is the FIFA, free software is you amateur football team.
- The FIFA will always tell you they love amateur soccer.
- The FIFA can be run by MBA, manager but your local group of friend/team cannot.
- Someone (probably the FIFA) is telling you your local team need the manager types for you to play soccer with others.
- If an overweight man who never played soccer come to invite you to play soccer in the weekend for free you might not go. If Pele come you will go.
- If an overweight man who never played soccer offer you a job at FIFA you will probably accept because you love soccer and for the money.
- The FIFA is more interested in people watching TV and ads on Sunday than people playing soccer outside. Ultimately they want you to love soccer but it need to be their way. And their way is watching TV and buying their jersey.
This is probably why Theo de Raadt might be a big A-Hole and said no to the FIFA but he is a good player and still have a fit team having fun outside every Sunday.
I wouldn't have bet on this outcome 20 years ago.
All those open source now corrupted foundations with the beautiful websites and the big titles and leadership pages pretend to be something they are not.
Spoken like someone who has zero experience developing open source software.
I work for a company that makes a very popular open source product. The users lead our development, not the coders. Hell, I don't even code, and I get to tell the engineers what to fix based on what our users complain about.
I suppose if you think of free software as a bunch of solo-coded GitHub projects, it can feel like the coders are king, but you absolutely don't maintain a project like Linux, or any of the major distros thereof, by giving coders supreme authority over decision-making...
The context in this discussion is FSF initiated projects.
Those who are in the wider use have been started and kept people like RMS. There are hundreds of them in dustbin or with minimal use.
Stuff like this makes me embarassed to say I write free software, which is already a niche position that will have you pigeonholed as it is.
The whole purpose of the Free Software movement, expressed in the GPL, is to protect the rights of end users above all others - even above the rights of the people creating the software in the first place and contributing to it.
A great deal of free software is developed by employees. Except in the most reductive sense (the employees could all quit) the decisions are made by the employers.
In this instance John Gilmore is funding the work. He's not doing it himself.
Telling anyone with opinions on your code to bug off as you disregard any outside input is a fine way to make sure no one uses it.
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 to support them: attack decisions, not résumés or gender.
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.
I think it’s referring to this line:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
Wow skimmed that part - yeah I guess fair enough
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.
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You started an entire flamewar with a gratuitous and offtopic provocation in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589157, and then perpetuated it.
Please don't do that on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Librephone is reverse engineering project that attempts to remove remaining proprietary binary modules, not a competing project.
> Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
Feminine? What on earth? How can an NGO have a gender? And more importantly, why does it need one? I like your comment, but the word "feminine" is really sexist, as if everything female was of less value.
people followed Stallman because the GNU stuff was interesting and good, then we got decades of endless dick-measuring about whose freedom is more free, GPL2 or GPL3 or MIT or AGPL or ...
and while the differences have consequences in the grand scheme of things what mattered is what the trillion dollar corporations wanted, because the FSF didn't manage to do shit, not even the feminine coordination (nor the masculine rallying cry to arms!)
The GNU stuff was precisely what FSF managed to do. They didn't manage to do more because they had a fraction of the resources large corporations had. People wanting more just doesn't create more by itself, they were reliant on our contributions and we failed them.
Today, I have access to quality tools on my computer and my computer runs Linux without any of the drama that proprietary equivalents bring and looks visually fantastic. My computer feels mine again and for that, I remain eternally grateful to the FSF.
that we failed them might be true, but mostly they did their things and the times changed, and lots of those things are not what users want/need, so the FSF/GNU got almost completely weightless.
... it seems to me that Stallman and the FSF got complacent by their relative (and out of my ignorance I'm now assuming that also unexpected) success, and also they completely misunderstood their value proposition, ie. the product, it was not gcc, emacs, or Hurd or whatever, it was the innovation to allow and foster technical public capital accumulation. (and still, it's absolutely a not solved problem to this day. the wheel is reinvented too fucking many times, even in software.)
... of course they do deserve credit, gratitude and a lot of respect and support for their integrity and steadfastness!
It is how the times are nowadays. You don't get the CEO throne of any org without chest-thumping your social justice initiatives. The FSF is merely following fully up2date standard operational procedures of Western civilization. How can you blame them for following the de-facto standards ?
Praise the Heavens that at-least 3/10 staff are coders. That is a far better ratio than most NGOs.
FSF is a social justice initiative.
It's time you stop blaming social justice initiatives for your own failures. The projection is clear.
It's wonderful that you've been privileged enough to not need to understand the point of "social justice", but it's not a bogeyman preventing you from being a leader.
> 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.
Yes we should have seen (me included) that going the free android distribution path was a long term trap.
This is where the Stallman hard, radical and long term vision make a lot of sense in retrospect. Because we see now Google is pulling the rug.
the smart strategy is to put effort into projects that have a fork failsafe option
and concentrate effort on the components that don't have this (ie. drivers, hardware, codecs, whatever), but instead what we got is 20 more years GnomeJS and whatnot.
FSF could finally take a look at webOS / Open WebOS and release it for devices.
Apps built in HTML/JS/CSS, straight from 2009.
The feminine vibe doesn't really land, and seems to kind of undermine the rest of what you're trying to say.
There's no shortages of OSS floating around with individuals butting heads about splitting hairs to their preferred interpretation, forking away into oblivion or to a standstill alone.
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LOL.
Compare and contrast this:
> Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
With this:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
>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"
Yes - why are these adjectives even coming up at all? There are alternatives that would probably make your point in a succinct manner without being sexist.
Yeah, that's still sexist. Was that your point, because it kinda feels like you're presenting this as a gotcha or something...
Yeah I think it’s fair to say that in many circumstances people would use masculine as a pejorative and not get called out for being sexist. There’s some historic power imbalance stuff at play there, but it’s still sexist.
If you have problems with some type of behaviour it’s much better to say exactly what they are rather than appealing to some platonic notion of sex characteristics, which is both offensive and poorly communicates your position.
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Feminine and masculine can be gender independent traits, the comment was sarcastic.
Criticizing a woman for failure because of femininity falls nonetheless more into sexism than actual criticism of actions taken.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Personal attacks will get you banned here, and you did it more than once. No more of this, please, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been posting tons of flamewar comments to HN and clearly using the site primarily for this, so I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
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It sounds like Stallman had quite the impact on you. Is it really so foreign to you that putting someone in a leadership position that can broaden that reach to people who are unlike you might be worth doing?
I only saw him once and I immediately understood how he could lead such a revolution.
It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
I am also very fond of Stallman, but we need to recognise that he had as many lovers as he had haters. He may have pushed many outside of the free software movement in fact because of his character.
I still think that the FSF needs a strong character with a clear vision, man or woman, but maybe with less orthodoxy than RMS.
Again, I appreciate that you found him inspiring. The point is that not everyone does.
Everyone can develop their own personal leadership too instead of looking to others and judging leadership.
If that were true, the world would be a lot better than it is in general.
It is true for the people who choose to lead themselves.
It doesn’t depend on external expression or validation.
Their point is obviously that they can't if they aren't qualified.
I don't know if that's actually true but it's clear what they're arguing here anyway.
Stallman has historically done pretty poorly at getting people involved in the free software movement. Before someone goes "surely you are talking about women and other underrepresented groups" no I am not talking about them, although that is also important of course. I'm talking about the people who are not hackers, the people who are stuck using Microsoft Office at their job but want to know about better options, the people who want their computer to not suddenly update and sell them ads but couldn't name a single programming language. Stallman has really dropped the ball for those people. I used to think he was quirky and principled too and I value his contributions but when I zoom out I've stopped finding that he's able to campaign for change effectively. Maybe he was qualified in 1980 but in a world where everyone has a phone in their pocket that is not only proprietary but that they can only really interact with as an appliance, perhaps he is not the most qualified person anymore.
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.
> 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.
I'm not sure this is guaranteed. GNU and the FSF have absolutely provided an enormous amount to the concepts and implementation of OS software. No doubt about it. Without it Linux would not exist, but it doesn't mean that'd have resulted in a widely used GNU alternative.
BUT, GNU/FSF also has a long history of losing focus on coding and spending a lot of time on political and philosophical arguments. I think it more likely BSD may have headed to where linux ended up than GNU. Linux was successful because they moved forwards and arguments were settled relatively quickly (for better and worse), whereas Hurd got stuck in development hell as people argued over how pure the microkernel architecture should be, pushing away people who just wanted things to work - including volunteers. During the crucial period over the 1990s, open source software needed to get things done (kind of like a startup). There are videos out there of people speaking at conferences about their work on Linux, and RMS being in the audience interjecting that it's "GNU/Linux" every time Linux was uttered. Who wants to work in an environment like that?
Even today, people are looking at more and more alternatives to important GNU software because of stagnation or other technical merits. GCC has lately seen alternatives become more common, as an example.
This also ignores the hostility the FSF historically has/had towards the commercial industry. Torvalds largely accepted patches from anybody if the code worked as intended.
Maybe something could have come out, but my gut tells me that people would have gravitated to something else that worked.
It was so inevitable that GNU Hurd should have been renamed GNU Albatross in the 1990s.
But how does this relate to gender? Even if you assume only two genders, why would being a feminine person play any role in their qualifications? That's what the comment was about.
I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field, so naturally we have to weight gender over qualifications. It's just the way things are. I wish it wasn't and qualifications/ability played a 100% part in these decisions.
> I would imagine because women are under-represented in this field,
So the ones in the field have passed a higher barrier and pressure and are more qualified than the p80 male.
This could be another spin on the topic ;)
You're assuming the Left stayed out of technology, and we still run a meritocracy.
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't think that it's the latter. Btw, these studies also show that "experience", and "qualification" were distorted for no good reason.
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.
Nobody said otherwise. Even sexists say the same thing because they can hide behind “sex blindness”, just like with racists and color blindness.
Are you saying that women with that qualification have the same opportunities as men without external intervention? Then why did you even bring up sex, and why I need to show you how to express it?
How would you quantify reach? The PR or number of projects delivered?
I value effectiveness in manifesting change in the world. This takes many forms. I think one of the most depressing and myopic views that hackers have is that code rules everything, when in fact social movements live and die upon their accessibility and impact. If you think that laboring in a cave and writing the next Free text editor is going to bring about free software, the reality is that three proprietary editors have already eaten its lunch, the latter two of which are VC backed and soon to require cloud registration, and the last which was written using AI trained on your code that you very carefully structured to be unusable to build non-free software on top of.
You are right, it is not about writing a code. That's the common problem when discussing free software among geeks.
Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc.
But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.
Women are more than seductresses. This is an apalling line of reasoning. There are a lot of issues to hate in our industry, and you lose all credibility by attempting to tie these issues to women.
If by impact you mean “turn off people from the movement” then sure. I happen to know multiple people who either met or even hosted him, and not a single one of them was impressed. Stallman was a horrible promoter.
> every time one of those foundations announce a "non coding" woman as their new leader, if you read between the lines, it is because they need to be more "ESG"
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
And this is how she behaves at conferences:
https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411
Leftwing political activism, cancel culture and #metoo-style witchhunts (example: https://pretty.direct/statement )
This is what the Scala "community" has become. It's tragic, given how good the language is.
Causation does not imply correlation.
That there are non-technical leaders who lose the thread does not mean that leaders lose the thread because they're non-technical.
There are plenty of technical leaders who have also gone off on personal tangents and vendettas!
Maybe a more accurate appraisal would be 'some people suck at a job, and it's unfortunately difficult to dislodge a bad leader anywhere'.
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
A.k.a. not getting paid, so you might as well do what you want.
How's the computing freedom for general audience? Better than ever, right?
Why do we need so many car models and manufacturers?
We don't.
But as soon as FOSS orgs will obtain resources comparable to those of car companies I will stop complaining.
I don't mind the many multiple distributions but the default experience really sucks.
For example, there should only ever be one clipboard by default. If power users want multiple, they can go out of their way to configure their device config as such. Similarly, the function keys should function as function keys on a keyboard out of the box, without us having to fiddle with config files. Also the scroll wheel click to scroll should work out of the box without requiring editing config files. The default experience is still pretty poor.
So what exactly is the problem? To many options?
The options thinking they're an island retreat only for those who agree with their way while standing on the same continent.
What's missing is building something that resonates with the user/consumer's experience backwards, not just personal preferences or interpretations, which is fine, but at that point it's a personal project, not a product, or much larger unless it really captivates both people who can contribute to creating it and also it is adopted quite easily.
Creating beginners can seem like something too many OSS projects can be allergic to. It's the greatest sin of too many projects, and they ultimately can't be freed of it.
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.
Hm, there is also an option to avoid creating yet another fork the moment someone said something unpopular, or to try helping improve existing solutions instead of creating yet another cool project that achieves nothing.
Of course no one can be forced to do so, but that's the problem - FOSS crowd would have to actually forced to cooperate, because otherwise petty dramas sabotage any common effort.
Forks happen, I think, because someone doesn't agree with the direction or can't get accepted into the clique of people working on something.
So if you tell them it's evil to fork you're saying, in effect, stop working.
I have lots of new functions for GNU make but the chance of getting them into make is almost 0 because the maintainer doesn't like this or that aspect of anything. Fortunately, I can make a fork. If people eventually show a desire to use my fork (nobody, unfortunately!) then he might eventually change his mind or develop some competing feature to kill mine off.
That's what is happening. To get people to pull together, they have to have a reason, like money.
Graceful forking is different than .. what too often happens with keyboard warrioring.
> 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...?
Licensing reasons apart it's exactly because governance, even of these big projects like GCC suck
Every project should have some competition, in the same way there are several commercial DBs available
At the same time we have several linux distros that suck in different ways
I found a distro I love. I was a Fedora user but it just ended up being far too complicated with selinux. It is a miserable job to try to create RPM packages that work and also miserable to try to build anything out of git where the dependencies offered by fedora were too old - and then it wouldn't work without some kind of selinux config anyhow.
Ubuntu went down the weird GUI route but Linux Mint is OK - it's just nearly as complicated as Fedora.
Now I'm using Artix. The install was a bit old school but that's a one off effort. It's a rolling distribution so I almost never need to build dependencies to get something from git to work. There's never a "big upgrade". No selinux. The packaging system is extremely easy to use so I can often install the very latest e.g. chromium from git by building it myself and installing the package rather than a messy self-install in /usr/local.
In Artix all packages install with the dev component - no separation between dev and binary. For me this is vastly less hassle.
You can use Arch Linux (Artix is an arch derivative), with systemd if you want but I like Artix with dinit - it has all the ease of use of systemd but with an architecture that I prefer.
It's probable that none of this appeals to you, but I just wanted to point out that in an odd way I tumbled through lots of distros (including ones that I haven't mentioned) and found a little heavenly one that I love using every day because it suits my personality - perhaps you will too.
It's a great idea. Why not join forces with the PinePhone and Librem folks? They're building the hardware and I'm sure they could use more software folk to help out with the firmware and OS.
https://librephone.fsf.org/FAQ.html
Currently scope only seems to go as far as the operating system
That's really as far as they need to go; if the userland is compatible with Linux, it can use all of the work that KDE and other organizations have put into building mobile interfaces.
These projects have stuff that works, but the lack of firmware for chips that can connect to modern cell infrastructure means that they can't really create an appealing product. The OS layer is where all previous Linux phone efforts have failed, and I hope the FSF makes it farther than everyone else has.
> The OS layer is where all previous Linux phone efforts have failed
The OS layer is where the existing projects are thriving, with various distros and shells to choose from to match one's needs and tastes. It's the appropriate hardware that's in undersupply. I'm using a Librem 5, a 2019 design, and if I wanted to switch to something newer I can't because there's no viable upgrade path on the market. No other hardware vendor has invested significant resources into mobile GNU/Linux since then, everything else is either purely community-based or uses Halium.
Does webrender work with the Librem 5? Last time I checked it didn't-- Firefox disallowed it because the etnaviv driver didn't have all the features available needed to enable it. It appears there's been a lot of work on etnaviv recently but I don't know if it affects this issue.
etnaviv doesn't do GLES3 yet, so no, but the work to support it (mostly done by Christian Gmeiner) is ongoing and progressing. I'm using Epiphany though, it's pretty snappy these days and I make extensive use of its webapp feature. I don't even remember when was the last time I had to fallback to Firefox because of some incompatibility, but it did happen at least once.
There are several comments about Linux on phones años PostMarketOS.
Apparently an usable daily driver already, FuriLabs' FLX1s. Nobody seems to have mentioned it yet.
https://furilabs.com/
This is interesting, but the image thing that caught my eye is their use of the Apple app store logo (being on a slow connection, the video at top didn't load very fast)
Librephone is reverse engineering project that attempts to remove remaining proprietary binary modules, not a competing project.
> Triaging existing packages and device compatibility to find a phone with the fewest, most fixable freedom problems is the first step. From there, the FSF and Savoye aim to reverse-engineer and replace the remaining nonfree software. Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
For it to succeed, they must also help put pressure on governments (countries like Brazil or Italy) and banks to stop depending on "Play Integrity" because only Google has the keys (and blocks leaked ones) so we can't count on bypasses being available (it's not just a matter of obfuscation).
This needs to be done before age verification apps become universal..
There was a time the brazilian government mandated free software in government computers. Lots of people hated it unfortunately. Eventually Microsoft lobbying put an end to it. That was around ten years ago... I wonder if such a thing could ever repeat again.
My thinking on mobile devices, and voice/comms more generally, is that we're probably better off separating the telco-link, voice, and general compute capabilities.
One element of this could be a WiFi-only phone, effectively a VOIP endpoint which relies on whatever local WiFi is available for connectivity. Where a fixed-point WiFi isn't present, that phone could rely on a cellular WiFi hotspot. Given the various vulnerabilities and proprietary aspects of cellular comms, this at least offloads the security concerns to its own device.
Increasingly people are relying on Bluetooth devices to hear and speak through smartphones. The logical extension to me is to move the primary phone guts entirely into a Bluetooth earpiece or headset. This would handle the voice aspect of the call itself.
Palmtop computing appears all but entirely dead (with some DIY/hobbyist exceptions, e.g., the MNT Reform Next (<https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next>). There are also small-form-factor laptops, with 12" and smaller screens being comparable with tablets (and even some of the larger monster smartphones available today), but offering a full, user-controlled, operating system.
There's still the problem of software availability in an iOS/Android App-dominated world. It's technically possible to run many of these within a VM or emulated environment, but some app providers, particularly for financial interactions, attempt to detect and disable this. Ultimately regulation and/or lawsuits may be necessary.
As power-hungry as they are, mobile devices do make remarkable use of available battery capabilities, which is a place traditional laptops will struggle with. There's the question of having to carry multiple devices, though I suspect many of us are doing so already. There's also the possibility that market segmentation will make such users attractive to business and other institutions, reducing the barriers that presently exist.
All that said, I do applaud the FSF's effort, though I would like to see other paths (such as the one I suggest here) pursued as well.
I'm currently hacking a toy OS in Zig on the PinePhone, and I have to say the documentation is a bit painful, or sometimes just missing, for parts of these complex SoCs, and that is meant to be a fairly open platform.
But the modem binary blob is a whole other world, and I am not sure how they could tackle that, since my understanding is that this is partly done for carrier licensing reasons? ie. to avoid abuse on the cellular networks. So isn't an open source radio driver also going to have to be licensed in the same way, and then ultimately shared as another binary blob?
The PinePhone compromise seems to be 'isolating' the modem & blob at the end of a USB link. Although I'm not 100% sure how that works yet, since I only just got the graphics & fonts working.
But even that is a bit of a puzzler, since I'm currently framebuffer-to-lcd based, but I know there is a Mali GPU hiding somewhere. I suspect that will also involve another blob. Anyway, the framebuffer approach seems fine for now, it is booting in ~2s, and the less binary blobs involved the better.
It will be interesting to see what FSF can achieve. But, personally I think they would be better focusing on a fully open-hardware dumb phone, and build upon that.
The world could have been very different today if Nintendo or Sony had put phone functionality in the DS and Vita.
Any reason that can't happen now in something like the Steam Deck?
USB modems exist and work on Linux[0]. The Steam Deck is a Linux computer with a USB port. You could be living this reality today.
[0] https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/usb-4g-lte-advanced-m...
They work fine for data and SMS, but it gets complicated once you need audio routing (it's rare for a modem to expose audio over USB) or waking up from low power mode to answer the incoming call. Could be done with M.2 USB modules and some dedicated controller in-between though.
HID USB devices can already wake up computer from sleep, so i dont think we need M2 here.
Also i dont think routing audio is problem, the dongle could represent itself as external audio device, like those external usb dac.
Of course it could! Now find one that does.
Vita had a WWAN variant. What that means is, hardware wise it's trivial, business wise it's impossible. It's always has been that way. It took Apple under peak Jobs leadership couple years to sell the iPhone globally.
something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play
With phone hardware lifetime so short, would it be possible to catch-up with hardware update cycle? I guess each new version of a phone can ship with new versions of binary blob drivers. As mentioned in the announcement, reverse engineering the blobs is a huge effort, when it is done, hardware may already be out of sale and the effort would need to be repeated for new versions.
I want this, even if it means we have to pay some of the people who work on this.
> Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
It may well be that Google will not rest until "Android-compatible" means that they can put their foot down on this. We should be prepared for that eventuality.
Cool idea, but I’m skeptical. I just want a phone that works—calls, texts, banking apps, and a good camera. If this Librephone can’t run my usual apps or needs me to wait years for it to work with new phones, I’ll stick to my current one. Why not team up with projects that already exist instead of starting over? Hope it works out, but I won’t hold my breath.
I think you misunderstood what they're planning to do.
Librephone isn't going to be releasing their own OS. It's an effort to systematically replace binary blobs so that existing projects like GrapheneOS and LineageOS are more free.
Took them long enough... The free software movement was still stuck on PC despite the fact the whole world moved to mobile. Glad to see they're finally starting to catch up.
They should probably prepare themselves to make ideological concessions... The situation is very ugly here in mobile land. Treacherous computing, remote attestation, DRM, all ubiquitous and normalized...
Two phones might be our sad reality, one for freedom, one for compliance.
The way I read this is that the FSF has gotten funding for one guy to work on this project. Great but as soon as you're doing anything hardware related you need to expend a lot of development effort just keeping up with new releases from hardware manufacturers. It's a never ending treadmill.
Why aren't they sending representatives to 6G standardization bodies? It's too late for 5G and under.
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.
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.
Given the nature of the phone hardware, would it be easier to develop a phone architecture from the ground up rather than trying to reverse engineer the existing phones? For instance, wouldn't it be easier to start with a power efficient, battery-powered SBC and then add on components needed for a phone rather than trying to reverse engineer a whole bunch of binary blobs and run into issues with DMCA etc?
All the best for the efforts, however I am bin long enough around this planet to not have big hopes how this will turn out.
Phones aren't x86 hardware, which only got open due to a lucky event, regretted by IBM.
Great idea. I'd love to hear something realistic like, "Practically everyone who uses a phone or computer is under surveillance. While this project may seem late relative to the damage done thru unlawful surveillance over previous decades, it represents a start that could lead to better privacy for some early adopters and gradual shift away from the blobs and proprietary technology that place control of our hardware in other hands than our own."
>Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom
I am so happy they are focusing on Android, one of the most popular operating systems widely used by every day people. This is important work for providing user friendly, free software to users.
Let's just hope they don't fall into the trap of disqualifying binary blobs sent as part of drivers vs opting for hardware that harcodes the blob.
Are you hoping the Free Software Foundation _doesn't_ prioritize Free Software? For people who are okay with random bits of proprietary software doing who-knows-what on their devices there are various alternatives already.
To me:
Open Source Firmware signed by OS > Firmware blob signed by device manufacturer > Firmware blob hardcoded by device Manufacturer
The FSF treats hardcoded firmware blobs as "free" and updatable firmware blobs as nonfree despite there not being a big difference between them in practice. And practical differences like being able to fix security issues benefits users.
> And practical differences like being able to fix security issues benefits users.
More often than not these updates are not actually benefits to the users.
Can you provide such an example? Because of bugs in the new version? A lot of the time old versions can still be loaded.
Just in the last couple of days:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45568700
There are by now thousands of examples of this, I wonder why you would ask for an example, this is about as uncontroversial as the sun going up tomorrow.
The number of times that Linux distros, free software, has made my computer unusable, requiring me to manually fix it, is uncountable. Bugs from OS updates is still entirely possible even without updating firmware blobs.
To a driver whose car just died on I 405 in heavy traffic that is a distinction without a difference.
> that is a distinction without a difference
Yes, agreed, the entire idea of OTA updates to cars has a lot of bad consequences. No matter the license.
So when we analyze the entire position of the FSF, all three cases listed above, I don't think you actually agree with them. FSF isn't against updating firmware on the fly, they just want certain things when it happens. And those things won't improve safety.
Agreed.
But: Stallman & the FSF are idealists, they are not in a position to argue for practical measures, by definition they have to take a relatively extremist position and dig in. If they didn't do that they would get nowhere. So I understand why they're doing it but I do not think their stance is overly practical or workable. But everybody will dilute that stance in their own particular way and so the net effect is potentially positive. If they would take a much milder stance then that positive effect would be diminished.
I would say that exempting unchangeable blobs is a big concession all by itself and the idealist position is that roms with programs need to be open source too.
Yes, I guess they gave up on that one realizing that it just isn't going to happen.
I don't even mind the ROMS, I mind the ROMS that I can not read out myself.
Thank you for clearing that up, I clearly misread that completely.
I initially made the same misread that you did...
The OP's point is, having the firmware permanently burnt-in on a ROM chip vs loaded as a binary blob via a driver doesn't change the "non-free"-ness of the firmware itself.
So opting for hardware which has a "fully-open-source" driver, but runs a binary blob encoded into the hardware, doesn't make the system fully open.
It's a take for a more Free system, not for accepting binary blobs.
(Or I guess for acknowledging that if you're willing to allow binary blobs stored in hardware, then dynamically-loaded binary blobs doesn't change the "free"-ness.)
That's not even close to what they said.
They're saying approval of any who-knows-what code shouldn't be decided based on how it's loaded.
Great. But IMHO better regulation is still needed: force makers to have unlockable bootloader and provided libre drivers for their device (for the OS that they originally ship with); force makers to provide alternatives - for example using alternative "play services" by only providing general API that others can provide pluggable implementaions…
Is there any other way than going through reverse engineering? Projects like LineageOS and others have shown this is really hard.
Why not simply start from scratch and make a truly open source phone? That is, design and build the electronics and the OS that goes on top of it. A bit like an iPhone+iOS but fully open source. Is this dream really unreachable?
I applaud the move, but it's going to be really hard if manufacturers aren't willing to document their chipsets and keep bootloaders locked. The folks at Pine64 were forced to waste resources to develop their own platform, which after the enormous effort ant time invested resulted outdated the day it came out of the factory, because of that.
> Triaging existing packages and device compatibility to find a phone with the fewest, most fixable freedom problems is the first step
Maybe this is my PM brain but why go after the most compatible devices first vs the most popular devices today?
Surely you’d maximize software freedom by targeting the most used devices so those can switch first
This is exciting, exceptionally the firmware & binary blob foundations that are the biggest roadblock.
Concerning the UI, I wish we had another attempt at a web-based mobile OS. FirefoxOS was too early, but APIs are much more mature now, and WASM offers great performance for low-level stuff. I might work on this full time when I retire.
Getting governments, banks and other big entities to play along here is going to be the main challenge.
One might think governments could get on board for the sake of digital independence/sovereignty ; but so far that hasn’t been the reality. One day digital sovereignty could become a real priority, then it could happen.
I think that day arrived Jan. 6th 2025. If the message doesn't land now it never will.
I highly doubt this will takeoff. I'm betting it never works beyond a couple outdated phones.
The concept of "outdated" is imposed by big tech itself through artificial restrictions. Apps are forced to update their minimum supported OS versions. Upgrades are stopped after 1 or 2 years. And so on.
Anyone who has replaced Windows 8 or Windows 10 on their 5+ year old machine with a distro like Xubuntu/Lubuntu realizes that "outdated" is often a sales propaganda term, not necessarily a technical term.
Does anyone know where the Linaro wiki has disappeared to?
An initiative that supports a (quasi) mainline linux kernel and driver support for smartphones seems like the more logical initiative before ironing in a smartphone linux distribution.
The fact that there is proprietary software running in "open source" mobile phone OSes may not be addressing the source of the problem. Because it seems that by funding a project like this it almost implies that the parties funding it don't necessarily trust the people who own and thus could open source the proprietary blobs tomorrow.
The leap I seem to have trouble getting to is this. If you can't trust the people responsible for the proprietary software, how can you be sure that they won't turn around and start using new chips or software once the existing ones are reverse engineered? Perhaps it's about patents and the patent holders could be using this IP as a cash cow?
I’m not saying this shouldn’t exist, because it should, but does anyone actually have any faith that the FSF can actually do anything here? They’re like 15 years late to the party
Yeah there's zero chance this will succeed. They would be much better off lobbying governments to enforce more openness in Android and iOS.
Thank you John Gilmore.
I'm confused. Hasn't the Librephone been in stalled development for over a decade?
Yeah, you really got projects mixed up. It was Replicant, the attempt at creating a libre Android distro, that got stalled. Stalled due to being unable to work around the nonfree device firmware and binary blobs found in today's smartphone models.
In contrast, Librephone has only been aannounced this week, and it attempts to reverse engineer stuff related to device firmware and binary blobs. It's not the same as creating another Android distro, and any usable results won't be tied to Android, so they for example can be used to give better support for mobile non-Android Linux efforts.
It's too late when we are moving away from phones and shifting towards wearable technology.
I suppose my PC's BIOS is a binary blob, yet I run open source Linux on that machine.
https://www.coreboot.org/
But do you trust that it obeys you and not three-letter agencies or hackers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
Let's hope the phone's ui won't look like FSF's website.
It will be much easier on the eyes (and perfect IMO) if font size changes from 13 to 16, and all line heights like 1 are fixed to 1.5.
ahahaha too true
but actually these kind of websites are way more informative also
instead of "clean" look where everything is just fluffed up
FSF never does and never will understand good software. The problem they have is they don't care about the user as much as they care about the developer. They want everything to be easy for the developer and they put the user second.
I guess it will be as successful as GNU Hurd and others.
dear FSF, let's discuss your https://librephone.fsf.org/ web site.
It does the job but it's not easy on the eye.
Full-width line of text. Readability nightmare. Here is how it looks with just a link to a CSS (I closed my eyes on the cssbed.com and picked one at random).
https://librephone.surge.sh/librephone-website.html
Yup, that's pretty bad. But, as an old fart with old eyes, I now use Safari and click the 'reader' version on many sites. Frankly, the web in it's early years was preferable to much of what I see nowadays. But, like I say, I'm an old fart. Heck, I used punch cards throughout my undergraduate days.
I use reader mode too. When I do it triggers a "imperfect lay-out" alarm.
I am a fan! I have missed this for years.
Good to see someone fighting the fight
To me this feels like blah blah blah, but I’d love to be very wrong, of course.
FSF is a joke
I'd like to see an android auto replacement, and them partnering with existing free phone approaches.
Two many xkcd already about creating new standards.
thank god.
Tom is a liar
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How will this phone comply with child safety laws?
*Edit* Because Idiots are Downvoting me, look at the texas law SB 2420 as an example. These phones will essentially be illegal in texas unless they comply with already passed laws.
They will comply with the law because they are not making a phone, or any product at all for that matter. This is a reverse engineering initiative.
Looks like we will have to wait forever.
I can't take these jokers seriously.
Years after mobile phones came onto the market they are now planning to create their own phone.
Not sure, but perhaps it could be somewhat easier to take them seriously if you had actually clicked on the link instead of living in an alternate reality where it's about "planning to create their own phone".
The FSF has never been a solid act.
For years they have studiously ignored the fact that the mobile phone is the place where many people engage with IT and have been faffing about in the desktop and server space.
Instead of leading they have always trailed behind. What they should have been doing was focusing on the software vision which they will most definitely screw up.
Focus on the software vision and wait for the deblobblable hardware to emerge or commission their own hardware from scratch.
I'm sorry but these guys have and will always be useless, much like the Wayland project.
How many years has that crew taken to create something fully capable of replacing X11?
Someone hasn't read the article.
These guys want to build on the Android foundation. I'm sorry but this will not work.