FSF announces Librephone project

https://www.fsf.org/news/librephone-project

by g-b-r • 9 months ago

1586 559 9 months ago

Terr_• 9 months ago

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

le-mark2• 9 months ago

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.

monero-xmr2• 9 months ago

If rich techies on this website want to support something worthwhile, here you go

lostmsu• 9 months ago

Not rich but is there a way to contribute specifically to this project? The donate button on the website does not work.

frogperson• 9 months ago

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.

BLKNSLVR6• 9 months ago

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.

criddell• 9 months ago

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.

jMyles3• 9 months ago

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.

wraptile• 9 months ago

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.

SV_BubbleTime• 9 months ago

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.

mike_d3• 9 months ago

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.

k_bx• 9 months ago

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.

barnabee• 9 months ago

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.

ryukoposting• 9 months ago

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.

beefnugs• 9 months ago

The time is right: the building is burning down around us, time to buy a fire extinguisher

bigstrat20034• 9 months ago

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.

endgame2• 9 months ago

It becomes much harder to force attestation on people if there's a significant user base that runs alternative operating systems.

bombcar3• 9 months ago

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

bigstrat20034• 9 months ago

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.

inatreecrown2• 9 months ago

you have to start somewhere, and with Goggle closing Android to non-approved apps this seems like the right move.

koolala8• 9 months ago

In an emergency, can't you call your bank over the phone? Do you depend on it still if you have a Computer?

jlokier3• 9 months ago

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.

monero-xmr2• 9 months ago

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.

userbinator4• 9 months ago

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.

randcraw• 9 months ago

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.

SoftTalker2• 9 months ago

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.

ttoinou2• 9 months ago

They more and more force you into 2FA through banking app

_blk3• 9 months ago

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.

rjdj377dhabsn5• 9 months ago

In SE Asia, most banks I've used no longer offer any services other than through their app.

varispeed3• 9 months ago

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.

bigstrat20034• 9 months ago

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.

Canada• 9 months ago

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.

ttoinou2• 9 months ago

Banking might be the wrong example to choose from here since we discovered with cryptos how to handle money without governments

Bender2• 9 months ago

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.

hypercube332• 9 months ago

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.

linguae• 9 months ago

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.

kovac• 9 months ago

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.

hnuser123456• 9 months ago

And I feel like it undermines any effort to make free, featureful applications if the hardware itself can't be trusted.

r2834923• 9 months ago

And FSF has a history of creating important OS level software.

BLKNSLVR6• 9 months ago

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).

pjmlp6• 9 months ago

Like they have been doing for Desktop Linux?

praptak• 9 months ago

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.

NoGravitas9• 9 months ago

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.

ipaddr• 9 months ago

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.

jeena• 9 months ago

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.

getpokedagain• 9 months ago

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.

varispeed3• 9 months ago

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.

drnick18• 9 months ago

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.

0xbadcafebee• 9 months ago

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.

1718627440• 9 months ago

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.

thuruv• 9 months ago

seconding this. more compatible with day-to-day life/apps means more adoption which I believe is a snowball effect.,

phs318u• 9 months ago

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).

mekoka• 9 months ago

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.

jay_kyburz• 9 months ago

The next step will be for them to prevent you connecting to the cellular network.

userbinator4• 9 months ago

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.

DonHopkins• 9 months ago

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

smashah• 9 months ago

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.

jlokier3• 9 months ago

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.

varispeed3• 9 months ago

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.

lambertsimnel• 9 months ago

Increasingly, browser-based online banking requires authentication with a proprietary smartphone app, where it used to accept other forms of 2FA

hedora3• 9 months ago

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?

scheeseman4862• 9 months ago

This won't help if Google/Apple/Microsoft roll out integrity checks for browsers, something which they have already suggested they want to do.

kees99• 9 months ago

...and packaging my app as a PWA is going to help with cantankerous bank/ditigal-id apps, how, exactly?

thedumbname• 9 months ago

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.

thaumasiotes• 9 months ago

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?

matheusmoreira3• 9 months ago

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.

jMyles3• 9 months ago

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.

nostrademons• 9 months ago

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.

wafflemaker• 9 months ago

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...

twothreeone• 9 months ago

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..

autoexec• 9 months ago

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.

geokon• 9 months ago

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

bigstrat20034• 9 months ago

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.

mrsssnake• 9 months ago

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.

pessimizer3• 9 months ago

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.

jajuuka2• 9 months ago

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.

martin82• 9 months ago

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.

its-summertime• 9 months ago

https://librephone.fsf.org/FAQ.html

Currently scope only seems to go as far as the operating system

soupy-soup• 9 months ago

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.

seba_dos19• 9 months ago

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.

bsimpson• 9 months ago

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

ACCount375• 9 months ago

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.

beeflet• 9 months ago

waydroid

ray_v2• 9 months ago

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.

ocdtrekkie• 9 months ago

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.

gertop• 9 months ago

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.

drnick18• 9 months ago

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.

NoGravitas9• 9 months ago

A fully degunked kernel that supports LineageOS with full hardware support is one that will also run PostmarketOS or similar.

_blk3• 9 months ago

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

crossroadsguy• 9 months ago

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.

rjdj377dhabsn5• 9 months ago

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.

o11c• 9 months ago

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", ...

anonzzzies• 9 months ago

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...

Tepix• 9 months ago

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.

NoGravitas9• 9 months ago

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.

flykespice• 9 months ago

They don't want to repeat GNU/Hurd tragedy

ACCount375• 9 months ago

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.

arminiusreturns• 9 months ago

Yep, with DMA sometimes. I've heard this same thing on the Pinephone forums iirc during the early years.

hypercube332• 9 months ago

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.

femto• 9 months ago

Not insurmountable, given the availability of srsRAN.

https://www.srsran.com/

ACCount375• 9 months ago

But are you enough of a madman to port that onto an undocumented magic modem?

kube-system8• 9 months ago

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.

tguvot4• 9 months ago

theoretically, there is lte cbrs where spectrum not licensed.

jMyles3• 9 months ago

Hopefully open mesh wifi will supplant cell phone networks anyway.

bouncycastle• 9 months ago

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)

ACCount375• 9 months ago

You can open source it. Unfortunately, "open source" doesn't mean "user is allowed to run his own code" nowadays.

pabs34• 9 months ago

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/

ACCount375• 9 months ago

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.

charcircuit4• 9 months ago

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.

tmtvl2• 9 months ago

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.

Dylan168073• 9 months ago

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.

degamad2• 9 months ago

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.)

charcircuit4• 9 months ago

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.

ggm• 9 months ago

Thank you John Gilmore.

zb3• 9 months ago

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..

matheusmoreira3• 9 months ago

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.

matheusmoreira3• 9 months ago

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...

glitchc2• 9 months ago

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.

IlikeKitties• 9 months ago

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.

kube-system8• 9 months ago

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.

Razengan• 9 months ago

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?

tom_alexander• 9 months ago

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...

seba_dos19• 9 months ago

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.

tguvot4• 9 months ago

something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play

numpad02• 9 months ago

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.

CMCDragonkai• 9 months ago

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-...

vectraMosaic64• 9 months ago

Two phones might be our sad reality, one for freedom, one for compliance.

kobieps• 9 months ago

Good to see someone fighting the fight

aussieguy1234• 9 months ago

I suppose my PC's BIOS is a binary blob, yet I run open source Linux on that machine.

floxy2• 9 months ago

https://www.coreboot.org/

fsflover31• 9 months ago

But do you trust that it obeys you and not three-letter agencies or hackers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

vfclists3• 9 months ago

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.

seba_dos19• 9 months ago

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".

vfclists3• 9 months ago

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?

drnick18• 9 months ago

Someone hasn't read the article.

vfclists3• 9 months ago

These guys want to build on the Android foundation. I'm sorry but this will not work.

neilv2• 9 months ago

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/

nicman232• 9 months ago

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

linmob3• 9 months ago

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.

positron264• 9 months ago

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."

linmob3• 9 months ago

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...

seba_dos19• 9 months ago

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? ;)

zozbot2345• 9 months ago

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.

mschuster91• 9 months ago

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.

neilv2• 9 months ago

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).

nullbyte808• 9 months ago

I highly doubt this will takeoff. I'm betting it never works beyond a couple outdated phones.

lovelearning• 9 months ago

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.

numpad02• 9 months ago

Why aren't they sending representatives to 6G standardization bodies? It's too late for 5G and under.

Worldblender2• 9 months ago

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.

r2834923• 9 months ago

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.

SchemaLoad6• 9 months ago

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.

NetMageSCW5• 9 months ago

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.

torben-friis2• 9 months ago

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.

sznio2• 9 months ago

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.

AnthonyMouse2• 9 months ago

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.

gradeless• 9 months ago

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.

j454• 9 months ago

I thought Asahi Linux had made some pretty sizeable progress, it was a very impressive project and labour of love and talent.

eptcyka2• 9 months ago

When it is this late, it might as well have been never.

goku12• 9 months ago

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.

a4564633• 9 months ago

Been running the latest lineageos without google crapware on oneplus 6. It is amazing

system2• 9 months ago

Let's hope the phone's ui won't look like FSF's website.

realaaa• 9 months ago

ahahaha too true

but actually these kind of websites are way more informative also

instead of "clean" look where everything is just fluffed up

aitchnyu• 9 months ago

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.

wltr5• 9 months ago

To me this feels like blah blah blah, but I’d love to be very wrong, of course.

z3ratul163071• 9 months ago

thank god.

pjmlp6• 9 months ago

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.

classified• 9 months ago

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.

gorgoiler2• 9 months ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 9 months ago

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.

gorgoiler2• 9 months ago

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.

germandiago• 9 months ago

I am a fan! I have missed this for years.

BLKNSLVR6• 9 months ago

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.

squarefoot• 9 months ago

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.

rcarmo• 9 months ago

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.

masfoobar• 9 months ago

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.

demaga2• 9 months ago

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.

franga20003• 9 months ago

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.

MrDrMcCoy3• 9 months ago

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.

zozbot2345• 9 months ago

..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.

devjab• 9 months ago

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.

bogwog4• 9 months ago

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.

cookiengineer3• 9 months ago

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.

realusername• 9 months ago

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

rjdj377dhabsn5• 9 months ago

Why is eBPF a problem?

cookiengineer3• 9 months ago

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

TranquilMarmot2• 9 months ago

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.

styanax• 9 months ago

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...

bebna• 9 months ago

I got an FP5, would not buy again.

haltcatchfire• 9 months ago

Could you elaborate on why? This type of comment doesn't add any value.

dddw• 9 months ago

Can you elaborate?

boudin• 9 months ago

I got a FP4, will definitely buy again.

GTP• 9 months ago

I considered purchasing it, but ultimately turned it down due to its size. What's the reason you're not liking it?

beeforpork• 9 months ago

We bought two FP5 with e/OS/ from Murena (for spouse and myself), and would buy again. Why wouldn't you?

fsflover31• 9 months ago

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/

rjsw• 9 months ago

We know that you will post something about Librem 5 so there is no need for anyone else to do it.

tyler-dot-earth• 9 months ago

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.

closeneough• 9 months ago

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.

fsflover31• 9 months ago

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.

Itoldmyselfso• 9 months ago

GrapheneOS has huge problems because of Pixel devices, which LineageOS could help with.

What are these "huge problems" caused by Pixel devices?

franga20003• 9 months ago

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.

moffkalast• 9 months ago

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.

fsflover31• 9 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925

wolvesechoes4• 9 months ago

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.

fsflover31• 9 months ago

Why do we need so many car models and manufacturers?

notrealyme1232• 9 months ago

So what exactly is the problem? To many options?

gitgud• 9 months ago

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

zozbot2345• 9 months ago

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.

m4rtink2• 9 months ago

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).

feitingen• 9 months ago

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.

fsflover31• 9 months ago

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.

j454• 9 months ago

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.

oblio• 9 months ago

Librem?

sznio2• 9 months ago

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"

fsflover31• 9 months ago

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.

galangalalgol2• 9 months ago

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?

3abiton• 9 months ago

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.

ForHackernews3• 9 months ago

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.

strcat3• 9 months ago

/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/.

honkostani• 9 months ago

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.

ookdatnog• 9 months ago

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.

ekianjo• 9 months ago

PostmarketOS has never achieved proper support on any device so far.

fsflover31• 9 months ago

Doesn't this count? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Purism_Librem5_(purism-li...

supermatt7• 9 months ago

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."

fsflover31• 9 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589873

RIMR• 9 months ago

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.

ycombinete• 9 months ago

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.

fsflover31• 9 months ago

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.

torginus• 9 months ago

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.

akagusu• 9 months ago

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.

positron264• 9 months ago

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.

a4564633• 9 months ago

PREACH. Sorry. I felt heard and seen!

bogwog4• 9 months ago

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.

pessimizer3• 9 months ago

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.

kristianpaul• 9 months ago

"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

TZubiri3• 9 months ago

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.

jabl• 9 months ago

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.

jacquesm7• 9 months ago

Getting governments, banks and other big entities to play along here is going to be the main challenge.

le-mark2• 9 months ago

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.

jacquesm7• 9 months ago

I think that day arrived Jan. 6th 2025. If the message doesn't land now it never will.

permalac• 9 months ago

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.

mrasong• 9 months ago

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.

rjdj377dhabsn5• 9 months ago

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.

mixedbit• 9 months ago

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.

mobileturdfctry• 9 months ago

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?

overgard• 9 months ago

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

IshKebab• 9 months ago

Yeah there's zero chance this will succeed. They would be much better off lobbying governments to enforce more openness in Android and iOS.

BaudouinVH2• 9 months ago

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

bluenose69• 9 months ago

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.

BaudouinVH2• 9 months ago

I use reader mode too. When I do it triggers a "imperfect lay-out" alarm.

whitehexagon• 9 months ago

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.

arnaudsm• 9 months ago

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.

penguin_booze2• 9 months ago

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.

heybales• 9 months ago

Congratulations, you just invented the open web circa 2006.

NoGravitas9• 9 months ago

Or FirefoxOS circa 2013.

woodrowbarlow• 9 months ago

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.

penguin_booze2• 9 months ago

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.

fsflover31• 9 months ago

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/

pabs34• 9 months ago

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.

tomtom302• 9 months ago

Tom is a liar

symbogra• 9 months ago

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.

nabla9• 9 months ago

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.

johnwheeler• 9 months ago

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.

ktosobcy• 9 months ago

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…

hamburgererror• 9 months ago

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?

pshirshov• 9 months ago

I guess it will be as successful as GNU Hurd and others.

misano• 9 months ago

It's too late when we are moving away from phones and shifting towards wearable technology.

charliebwrites• 9 months ago

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

lejalv• 9 months ago

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/

efreak2• 9 months ago

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)

john01dav2• 9 months ago

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.

nektro• 9 months ago

FSF is a joke

DoctorOetker• 9 months ago

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.

bolangi• 9 months ago

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."

jajuuka2• 9 months ago

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.

dredmorbius• 9 months ago

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.

cpburns2009• 9 months ago

I'm confused. Hasn't the Librephone been in stalled development for over a decade?

Worldblender2• 9 months ago

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.

pkphilip• 9 months ago

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?

FSF announces Librephone project

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