6 ms·

> I can't believe this amazing software is free in all senses of the word. I wish that were true, but if you delete the 100s of binary blobs (many with effecti

by lrvick 1y ago

> I can't believe this amazing software is free in all senses of the word. I wish that were true, but if you delete the 100s of binary blobs (many with effectively root access) copied from a stock donor vendor partition the phone won't function at all. There is no such thing as a fully open source and user controlled Android device today.

rtpg 1y ago
Was there ever? And is the situation improving or worsening? I am alright with things that allow for improvement, at least in theory
- couscouspie 1y ago
  Anyways, we as informed consumers are hopefully all agreeing on striving for an open mobile OS and open hardware. For those of us, who consider themselves democratic, that is even an imperative.
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  Not sure what the situation is with Librem, Pine and Joola/SailfishOS, maybe those qualify?
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
    I tried librem and pine a year or so ago. As long as it is basic phone use ( phone, text ), it is ok for daily use. That said, the experience is nowhere near ok experience in terms of speed or responsiveness, when compared to most basic android phones. I do not know if that changed since, but librem left a bad taste in my mouth based on how they seem to operate. Pine, by comparison, was a lot more honest about its limitations.
  - strcat 1y ago
    The Librem 5 and Pinephone are closed source hardware with closed source firmware. It's a misconception that they're open source. They have open source drivers, not hardware and firmware. SailfishOS is not open source itself. It's far less open source than Android which has the Android Open Source Project with the whole base OS.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      Open source drivers is a big step forward we must not discount, creating a separation between hardware trust and OS trust. That said, to your point, both are misrepresented as fully open frequently which is just not true, and obscures efforts by teams that are working on fully open hardware solutions the hard way.
      - strcat 1y ago
        > creating a separation between hardware trust and OS trust Typical Android devices have fully open source kernel drivers. There are usually dozens of closed source libraries in userspace such as the well known Mali GPU driver library. Closed source libraries can still be reviewed. Open source doesn't make something secure and trustworthy. It also isn't a hard requirement to review a library. Auditing a low-level C library doesn't imply finding all the vulnerabilities, particularly something hidden. Widely used open source code still has many vulnerabilities lasting for long periods of time after many people have reviewed it. It does not solve security or trust. > That said, to your point, both are misrepresented as fully open frequently which is just not true, and obscures efforts by teams that are working on fully open hardware solutions the hard way. A closed source SoC with open source hardware built around it and other closed source components including radios is not a fully open source computer either.
    - mixmastamyk 1y ago
      Purism uses U-Boot on the Librem5 and modified coreboot (in other places) I believe. https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/purism/librem5.html https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/purism/librem5.html
      - strcat 1y ago
        This doesn't mean it's open hardware or that it has open firmware. It has a closed source SoC and many other closed source components. Those components are closed source hardware with closed source firmware. Snapdragon uses a fork of the open source EDK2 as their bootloader prior to the OS and publishes the source code. It doesn't mean Snapdragon is open source. Most of the firmware has nothing to do with the boot chain leading up to the OS on the SoC.
- lrvick 1y ago
  Replicant was the last time we had fully open Android devices. We have regressed.
  - strcat 1y ago
    All of those were closed source hardware with tons of closed source firmware. Not shipping firmware updates doesn't mean the firmware doesn't exist. There aren't open source devices in general. It's not specific to smartphones.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal. Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use. When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors. This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can.
      - strcat 1y ago
        > The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal. They did not replace firmware with open alternatives. Not updating firmware is not replacing it. > Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use. They steer people to devices with severe unpatched firmware vulnerabilities and an enormous number of severe unpatched software vulnerabilities in the case of Replicant. This is covered up and people are misled about it. These projects claiming to be focused on avoiding backdoors are in fact deliberately backdoored through not patching known vulnerabilities for ideological reasons. > When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors. You still trust the developers of open source software and firmware. Open source doesn't result in all vulnerabilities being found, including intentional ones. It's not even close to providing it. > This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can. The platforms you're describing as having fully open firmware still have closed source firmware.
cherryteastain 1y ago
This is also the case with mainline linux though. Good luck using Nvidia graphics with only FOSS components. Even more FOSS friendly graphics vendors like AMD and Intel rely on binary firmware.
- bowsamic 1y ago
  Indeed, mainline linux distros aren't free software either
  - lrvick 1y ago
    I have run nvidia cards without proprietary drivers for years. Nouveau. With the right hardware choices running blob-free linux is pretty straightforward.
    - Andromxda 1y ago
      > Nouveau. Which Nvidia card do you have, and at which clock speed does your GPU run? > With the right hardware choices running blob-free linux is pretty straightforward. Unfortunately no. Features like SSE are pretty amazing and have made CPUs really fast and efficient, but they're unfortunately also large attack vectors, so vulnerabilities like Spectre or Meltdown occur. You need proprietary microcode blobs to fix those security vulnerabilities in your CPU.
      - lrvick 1y ago
        An Nvidia GPU is never going to run at maximum clock speed etc on open drivers right now, but the point is if you prioritize security/privacy/freedom you have choices. If you are not running games (which you should not on a system you need to be able to trust) maximum clock speed from a modern GPU is not needed for most workstation applications. I generally choose AMD GPUs for the best experience with open drivers these days on systems I need high GPU performance from. > You need proprietary microcode blobs to fix those security vulnerabilities in your CPU. Really? Which blobs do I need on RISC-V FPGA enclaves or my PPC64le Talos II workstation which has a fully open hardware motherboard and open CPU architecture? I make different tradeoffs on different hardware to be sure depending on the threat model of the task I am working on. x86_64 is a bit of a shit show, but you still only have to trust your CPU vendor even there, as it is possible to have FOSS firmware/software for everything else.
morserer 1y ago
It's not all grim. GrapheneOS utilizes IOMMU to isolate the baseband and sandbox the wireless components. Even with binary blobs, the wireless radios cannot read encrypted traffic. https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation Sure, it's not perfect, but it's still really, really good. Even with the binary blobs that are on it, Graphene phones have been impossible to unlock via commercial cracking tools since 2022. https://osservatorionessuno.org/blog/2025/03/a-deep-dive-into-cellebrite-android-support-as-of-february-2025/#the-february-2025-support-matrix https://osservatorionessuno.org/blog/2025/03/a-deep-dive-int...
- strcat 1y ago
  Laptops, desktops, smartphones or tablets are closed source hardware with closed source firmware in general. There are products marketed as if they're open source devices which are in fact closed source hardware with almost entirely closed source firmware. The software on top being open source is frequently misrepresented as the device itself being open source, which isn't the case. Not shipping important firmware updates in the OS provides assurance of insecurity while not changing the fact that the hardware and firmware is closed source. It has to do with a loophole defined in a certain ideology around software, not open hardware or privacy/security.
gf000 1y ago
As opposed to using what, hand gestures? There is simply no production ready hardware with non-proprietary software at all.
- palata 1y ago
  > As opposed to using what, hand gestures As opposed to "being free in all senses of the word", which is what the comment was talking about.
- rst 1y ago
  People go through all sorts of weird mental gymnastics about this. The FSF at one point took the position that binary blobs were cool so long as they could not be upgraded, because then you could pretend they weren't software at all, but just part of the wiring. I've seen this odd line of thought attributed to RMS himself, but here's an FSF statement, from when he was running it: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/task2-openmoko https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/task2-openmoko
- const_cast 1y ago
  Yes, which is a huge problem. This is a big part of why Android phones suck so much ass - you're often stuck on old versions of android because the hardware vendors are too lazy to update their proprietary bullshit blobs that barely fucking work. And now you're running a two year old phone and it's effectively obsolete. If they would just upstream their firmware into the Linux kernel, you could upgrade these phones for years and years. Until the hardware is actually physically incapable of running the latest features. Some vendors, like Google, promise to provide updates for a long time. But it's just that - a promise. There's no technical guarantee or mechanism for this, it's purely based on trust.
- lrvick 1y ago
  No production ready -mobile- hardware, I would agree. The Precursor is promising, but software is not there yet. I sit down at my desktop computer and send emails and type messages like this one. Then I get up from my desk and spend time with my family offline and present. It's pretty great.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
Let's not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. GrapheneOS does what it can to isolate those things as much as possible. It even makes good use of hardware features such as the IOMMU. It's a huge improvement on the status quo, even though it's not going to pass FSF RYF certification.
- strcat 1y ago
  FSF RYF certification is anti-freedom, anti-privacy and anti-security. Pretending hardware is open because there aren't closed source components which are / can be updated doesn't make sense. They certify closed source hardware with closed source firmware. In many cases, privacy and security has been crippled to obtain the certification by preventing important firmware upgrades. Not shipping firmware updates in the OS doesn't mean the firmware isn't there and doesn't make the hardware or firmware open source. GrapheneOS wants to have actual open source hardware and firmware, not what the FSF is peddling. We certainly don't want to block people getting important firmware upgrades needed to defend devices. FSF heavily misleads people about these topics for ideological reasons.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    I agree with you. I think FSF RYF is a pointless certification since firmware isn't going away anytime soon. I'm not a fan of their "it's part of the wiring if you can't upgrade it" compromise either since it doesn't achieve their goals and makes the situation even worse. It would be nice if the firmware itself was free software so that it could be shipped alongside the Linux kernel, maintained indefinitely and we could customize it however we want. The hardware is supposed to do what we want it to do, not what the manufacturer lets us do. I don't like the fact every single device out there has entirely separate computers inside them running unknown proprietary software. It feels like our operating systems aren't operating the system anymore, it's like they're just some user app sandboxed away from the real system. This presentation explains what I mean: https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo It's an imperfect reality. Security by isolation of devices via IOMMU addresses real concerns such as devices being able to access RAM via DMA. It's great that GrapheneOS is doing this.
strcat 1y ago
Laptops, desktops, smartphones or tablets are closed source hardware with closed source firmware in general. There are products marketed as if they're open source devices which are in fact closed source hardware with almost entirely closed source firmware. The software on top being open source is frequently misrepresented as the device itself being open source, which isn't the case. Not shipping important firmware updates in the OS provides assurance of insecurity while not changing the fact that the hardware and firmware is closed source. It has to do with a loophole defined in a certain ideology around software, not open hardware or privacy/security.
- lrvick 1y ago
  Plenty of laptops exist you can get away with running fully open source and auditable firmware, and a few that are mostly open hardware too, by the MNT Reform team. The Precursor is the only pocket computer platform that is maximally open hardware, software, and firmware but you revert back to the 90s in terms of power as a consequence with alpha quality software today. If Bunnie is successful with his IRIS approach and making custom home-user-inspectable ASICS then maybe a middle ground path can be forged in the next few years. For now the only modern computing experience with fully open hardware and software I am aware of are the ppc64le based devices by Raptor Engineering, but at a very high cost due to low demand, with huge form factor and no power management. I still own one anyway because we have to start somewhere. For those that want this story to get better, please buy and promote the products of the few people trying to break us out of dependence on proprietary platforms.
  - strcat 1y ago
    > Plenty of laptops exist you can get away with running fully open source and auditable firmware, and a few that are mostly open hardware too, by the MNT Reform team. MNT Reform has a regular closed source ARM SoC as the main component along with a bunch of other closed source components. The chassis, board and boot chain being open doesn't make a device mostly open hardware. Anything simply using an ARM or x86_64 SoC at the core is not truly mostly open. It's a closed source system (the SoC) with open source components between it and other closed source components like radios, a display controller, SSD, etc. The same applies to other ARM and x86_64 laptops. They're built around closed source components even if the board many components go in and the boot chain is open source. Having an open source boot chain and not requiring loading proprietary firmware from there or from the OS doesn't mean the device has open firmware. It's conflating not needing to load firmware with the firmware not existing or being open, which isn't the case. > The Precursor is the only pocket computer platform that is maximally open hardware, software, and firmware but you revert back to the 90s in terms of power as a consequence with alpha quality software today. If Bunnie is successful with his IRIS approach and making custom home-user-inspectable ASICS then maybe a middle ground path can be forged in the next few years. This is far closer to being how you're describing other platforms. However, it does have closed source components including the FPGA and Wi-Fi. It's as close as it gets to being open hardware and that has a huge cost. Platforms simply using a closed source ARM SoC and many other closed source components are not anywhere close to being open. This is what it takes to get close, and it's not fully there. > For now the only modern computing experience with fully open hardware and software I am aware of are the ppc64le based devices by Raptor Engineering, but at a very high cost due to low demand, with huge form factor and no power management. I still own one anyway because we have to start somewhere. It's the motherboard that's open source. The IBM CPUs used with it are not open hardware. > For those that want this story to get better, please buy and promote the products of the few people trying to break us out of dependence on proprietary platforms. Laptops with a nearly completely closed source SoC / CPU are not a fully open platform, especially when it's an SoC providing most of the functionality. Talos II has a lot of functionality on their open motherboard vs. an ARM SoC with most of it on the SoC, but either way the CPU being closed source is still the most core component being closed source.
Grimblewald 1y ago
[dead]

by lrvick 1y ago

rtpg 1y ago

Was there ever? And is the situation improving or worsening? I am alright with things that allow for improvement, at least in theory

couscouspie 1y ago
Anyways, we as informed consumers are hopefully all agreeing on striving for an open mobile OS and open hardware. For those of us, who consider themselves democratic, that is even an imperative.
bornfreddy 1y ago
Not sure what the situation is with Librem, Pine and Joola/SailfishOS, maybe those qualify?
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  I tried librem and pine a year or so ago. As long as it is basic phone use ( phone, text ), it is ok for daily use. That said, the experience is nowhere near ok experience in terms of speed or responsiveness, when compared to most basic android phones. I do not know if that changed since, but librem left a bad taste in my mouth based on how they seem to operate. Pine, by comparison, was a lot more honest about its limitations.
- strcat 1y ago
  The Librem 5 and Pinephone are closed source hardware with closed source firmware. It's a misconception that they're open source. They have open source drivers, not hardware and firmware. SailfishOS is not open source itself. It's far less open source than Android which has the Android Open Source Project with the whole base OS.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    Open source drivers is a big step forward we must not discount, creating a separation between hardware trust and OS trust. That said, to your point, both are misrepresented as fully open frequently which is just not true, and obscures efforts by teams that are working on fully open hardware solutions the hard way.
    - strcat 1y ago
      > creating a separation between hardware trust and OS trust Typical Android devices have fully open source kernel drivers. There are usually dozens of closed source libraries in userspace such as the well known Mali GPU driver library. Closed source libraries can still be reviewed. Open source doesn't make something secure and trustworthy. It also isn't a hard requirement to review a library. Auditing a low-level C library doesn't imply finding all the vulnerabilities, particularly something hidden. Widely used open source code still has many vulnerabilities lasting for long periods of time after many people have reviewed it. It does not solve security or trust. > That said, to your point, both are misrepresented as fully open frequently which is just not true, and obscures efforts by teams that are working on fully open hardware solutions the hard way. A closed source SoC with open source hardware built around it and other closed source components including radios is not a fully open source computer either.
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    Purism uses U-Boot on the Librem5 and modified coreboot (in other places) I believe. https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/purism/librem5.html https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/purism/librem5.html
    - strcat 1y ago
      This doesn't mean it's open hardware or that it has open firmware. It has a closed source SoC and many other closed source components. Those components are closed source hardware with closed source firmware. Snapdragon uses a fork of the open source EDK2 as their bootloader prior to the OS and publishes the source code. It doesn't mean Snapdragon is open source. Most of the firmware has nothing to do with the boot chain leading up to the OS on the SoC.
lrvick 1y ago
Replicant was the last time we had fully open Android devices. We have regressed.
- strcat 1y ago
  All of those were closed source hardware with tons of closed source firmware. Not shipping firmware updates doesn't mean the firmware doesn't exist. There aren't open source devices in general. It's not specific to smartphones.
  - lrvick 1y ago
    The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal. Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use. When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors. This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can.
    - strcat 1y ago
      > The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal. They did not replace firmware with open alternatives. Not updating firmware is not replacing it. > Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use. They steer people to devices with severe unpatched firmware vulnerabilities and an enormous number of severe unpatched software vulnerabilities in the case of Replicant. This is covered up and people are misled about it. These projects claiming to be focused on avoiding backdoors are in fact deliberately backdoored through not patching known vulnerabilities for ideological reasons. > When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors. You still trust the developers of open source software and firmware. Open source doesn't result in all vulnerabilities being found, including intentional ones. It's not even close to providing it. > This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can. The platforms you're describing as having fully open firmware still have closed source firmware.

cherryteastain 1y ago

This is also the case with mainline linux though. Good luck using Nvidia graphics with only FOSS components. Even more FOSS friendly graphics vendors like AMD and Intel rely on binary firmware.

bowsamic 1y ago
Indeed, mainline linux distros aren't free software either
- lrvick 1y ago
  I have run nvidia cards without proprietary drivers for years. Nouveau. With the right hardware choices running blob-free linux is pretty straightforward.
  - Andromxda 1y ago
    > Nouveau. Which Nvidia card do you have, and at which clock speed does your GPU run? > With the right hardware choices running blob-free linux is pretty straightforward. Unfortunately no. Features like SSE are pretty amazing and have made CPUs really fast and efficient, but they're unfortunately also large attack vectors, so vulnerabilities like Spectre or Meltdown occur. You need proprietary microcode blobs to fix those security vulnerabilities in your CPU.
    - lrvick 1y ago
      An Nvidia GPU is never going to run at maximum clock speed etc on open drivers right now, but the point is if you prioritize security/privacy/freedom you have choices. If you are not running games (which you should not on a system you need to be able to trust) maximum clock speed from a modern GPU is not needed for most workstation applications. I generally choose AMD GPUs for the best experience with open drivers these days on systems I need high GPU performance from. > You need proprietary microcode blobs to fix those security vulnerabilities in your CPU. Really? Which blobs do I need on RISC-V FPGA enclaves or my PPC64le Talos II workstation which has a fully open hardware motherboard and open CPU architecture? I make different tradeoffs on different hardware to be sure depending on the threat model of the task I am working on. x86_64 is a bit of a shit show, but you still only have to trust your CPU vendor even there, as it is possible to have FOSS firmware/software for everything else.

morserer 1y ago

It's not all grim. GrapheneOS utilizes IOMMU to isolate the baseband and sandbox the wireless components. Even with binary blobs, the wireless radios cannot read encrypted traffic. https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation Sure, it's not perfect, but it's still really, really good. Even with the binary blobs that are on it, Graphene phones have been impossible to unlock via commercial cracking tools since 2022. https://osservatorionessuno.org/blog/2025/03/a-deep-dive-into-cellebrite-android-support-as-of-february-2025/#the-february-2025-support-matrix https://osservatorionessuno.org/blog/2025/03/a-deep-dive-int...

strcat 1y ago
Laptops, desktops, smartphones or tablets are closed source hardware with closed source firmware in general. There are products marketed as if they're open source devices which are in fact closed source hardware with almost entirely closed source firmware. The software on top being open source is frequently misrepresented as the device itself being open source, which isn't the case. Not shipping important firmware updates in the OS provides assurance of insecurity while not changing the fact that the hardware and firmware is closed source. It has to do with a loophole defined in a certain ideology around software, not open hardware or privacy/security.

gf000 1y ago

As opposed to using what, hand gestures? There is simply no production ready hardware with non-proprietary software at all.

palata 1y ago
> As opposed to using what, hand gestures As opposed to "being free in all senses of the word", which is what the comment was talking about.
rst 1y ago
People go through all sorts of weird mental gymnastics about this. The FSF at one point took the position that binary blobs were cool so long as they could not be upgraded, because then you could pretend they weren't software at all, but just part of the wiring. I've seen this odd line of thought attributed to RMS himself, but here's an FSF statement, from when he was running it: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/task2-openmoko https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/task2-openmoko
const_cast 1y ago
Yes, which is a huge problem. This is a big part of why Android phones suck so much ass - you're often stuck on old versions of android because the hardware vendors are too lazy to update their proprietary bullshit blobs that barely fucking work. And now you're running a two year old phone and it's effectively obsolete. If they would just upstream their firmware into the Linux kernel, you could upgrade these phones for years and years. Until the hardware is actually physically incapable of running the latest features. Some vendors, like Google, promise to provide updates for a long time. But it's just that - a promise. There's no technical guarantee or mechanism for this, it's purely based on trust.
lrvick 1y ago
No production ready -mobile- hardware, I would agree. The Precursor is promising, but software is not there yet. I sit down at my desktop computer and send emails and type messages like this one. Then I get up from my desk and spend time with my family offline and present. It's pretty great.

matheusmoreira 1y ago

Let's not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. GrapheneOS does what it can to isolate those things as much as possible. It even makes good use of hardware features such as the IOMMU. It's a huge improvement on the status quo, even though it's not going to pass FSF RYF certification.

strcat 1y ago
FSF RYF certification is anti-freedom, anti-privacy and anti-security. Pretending hardware is open because there aren't closed source components which are / can be updated doesn't make sense. They certify closed source hardware with closed source firmware. In many cases, privacy and security has been crippled to obtain the certification by preventing important firmware upgrades. Not shipping firmware updates in the OS doesn't mean the firmware isn't there and doesn't make the hardware or firmware open source. GrapheneOS wants to have actual open source hardware and firmware, not what the FSF is peddling. We certainly don't want to block people getting important firmware upgrades needed to defend devices. FSF heavily misleads people about these topics for ideological reasons.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  I agree with you. I think FSF RYF is a pointless certification since firmware isn't going away anytime soon. I'm not a fan of their "it's part of the wiring if you can't upgrade it" compromise either since it doesn't achieve their goals and makes the situation even worse. It would be nice if the firmware itself was free software so that it could be shipped alongside the Linux kernel, maintained indefinitely and we could customize it however we want. The hardware is supposed to do what we want it to do, not what the manufacturer lets us do. I don't like the fact every single device out there has entirely separate computers inside them running unknown proprietary software. It feels like our operating systems aren't operating the system anymore, it's like they're just some user app sandboxed away from the real system. This presentation explains what I mean: https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo https://youtu.be/36myc8wQhLo It's an imperfect reality. Security by isolation of devices via IOMMU addresses real concerns such as devices being able to access RAM via DMA. It's great that GrapheneOS is doing this.

strcat 1y ago

Laptops, desktops, smartphones or tablets are closed source hardware with closed source firmware in general. There are products marketed as if they're open source devices which are in fact closed source hardware with almost entirely closed source firmware. The software on top being open source is frequently misrepresented as the device itself being open source, which isn't the case. Not shipping important firmware updates in the OS provides assurance of insecurity while not changing the fact that the hardware and firmware is closed source. It has to do with a loophole defined in a certain ideology around software, not open hardware or privacy/security.

lrvick 1y ago
Plenty of laptops exist you can get away with running fully open source and auditable firmware, and a few that are mostly open hardware too, by the MNT Reform team. The Precursor is the only pocket computer platform that is maximally open hardware, software, and firmware but you revert back to the 90s in terms of power as a consequence with alpha quality software today. If Bunnie is successful with his IRIS approach and making custom home-user-inspectable ASICS then maybe a middle ground path can be forged in the next few years. For now the only modern computing experience with fully open hardware and software I am aware of are the ppc64le based devices by Raptor Engineering, but at a very high cost due to low demand, with huge form factor and no power management. I still own one anyway because we have to start somewhere. For those that want this story to get better, please buy and promote the products of the few people trying to break us out of dependence on proprietary platforms.
- strcat 1y ago
  > Plenty of laptops exist you can get away with running fully open source and auditable firmware, and a few that are mostly open hardware too, by the MNT Reform team. MNT Reform has a regular closed source ARM SoC as the main component along with a bunch of other closed source components. The chassis, board and boot chain being open doesn't make a device mostly open hardware. Anything simply using an ARM or x86_64 SoC at the core is not truly mostly open. It's a closed source system (the SoC) with open source components between it and other closed source components like radios, a display controller, SSD, etc. The same applies to other ARM and x86_64 laptops. They're built around closed source components even if the board many components go in and the boot chain is open source. Having an open source boot chain and not requiring loading proprietary firmware from there or from the OS doesn't mean the device has open firmware. It's conflating not needing to load firmware with the firmware not existing or being open, which isn't the case. > The Precursor is the only pocket computer platform that is maximally open hardware, software, and firmware but you revert back to the 90s in terms of power as a consequence with alpha quality software today. If Bunnie is successful with his IRIS approach and making custom home-user-inspectable ASICS then maybe a middle ground path can be forged in the next few years. This is far closer to being how you're describing other platforms. However, it does have closed source components including the FPGA and Wi-Fi. It's as close as it gets to being open hardware and that has a huge cost. Platforms simply using a closed source ARM SoC and many other closed source components are not anywhere close to being open. This is what it takes to get close, and it's not fully there. > For now the only modern computing experience with fully open hardware and software I am aware of are the ppc64le based devices by Raptor Engineering, but at a very high cost due to low demand, with huge form factor and no power management. I still own one anyway because we have to start somewhere. It's the motherboard that's open source. The IBM CPUs used with it are not open hardware. > For those that want this story to get better, please buy and promote the products of the few people trying to break us out of dependence on proprietary platforms. Laptops with a nearly completely closed source SoC / CPU are not a fully open platform, especially when it's an SoC providing most of the functionality. Talos II has a lot of functionality on their open motherboard vs. an ARM SoC with most of it on the SoC, but either way the CPU being closed source is still the most core component being closed source.

Grimblewald 1y ago

[dead]