22 ms·

FSF announces Librephone project

1586 points by g-b-r 1y ago

Terr_ 1y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286
le-mark 1y 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-xmr 1y ago
  If rich techies on this website want to support something worthwhile, here you go
  - lostmsu 1y ago
    Not rich but is there a way to contribute specifically to this project? The donate button on the website does not work.
    - tjr 1y ago
      I would have expected an online means to contribute specifically to Librephone, but indeed, seems like nothing yet. Hopefully it is forthcoming. Otherwise, their website suggests you can specify a particular project via the memo line of a check: https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate/ https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate/
    - r283492 1y ago
      As the first project FSF has launched in years with a current budget of one developer I expect they will be happy to spend new donations on further funding for it. However, it is very uncommon for a nonprofit to have a separate fund for a project that is part of the organization itself, rather than a project which makes semi-independent decisions and is fiscally sponsored by a related nonprofit. The exception is usually when some very large donor which insists on that arrangement.
      - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
        I was talking to someone who is involved in a nature conservation nonprofit recently - small donations go into the general pot of money for the organization to choose how to spend it. If you want to influence what the money is used for you have to donate a significantly higher sum. They said they like having many small donors because they can fund things that don't necessarily make a big splash in a press release but are important precursors to impact (e.g. researching what projects would have the most impact vs actually implementing a project).
    - wltr 1y ago
      Upon commenting, I removed the snarky part of the website being visually… well, bad. After all, FSF isn’t about design and aesthetics, right? But donate button not working demonstrates the whole seriousness of the effort.
- frogperson 1y 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.
  - BLKNSLVR 1y 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 1y 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.
  - jMyles 1y 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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - scuff3d 1y ago
      Maybe, but that pain point isn't something free software is going to fix. Obviously not everyone has the same problems with their phone, but largely I think they fall into a few categories: notification overload, apps designed to keep you scrolling for every last minute of the day, and dark patterns or other design choices aimed at separating users from as much of their money as possible. Every single one of these is fixable on any modern phone. Stop using social media, take a hatchet to what apps can send you notifications and when, and be more mindful of what tricks are commonly deployed to steal your attention, time, and money. But people can't even manage that. They don't even have to do anything, they just have to stop doing certain things, but they can't or won't. Those same people aren't going to go through the effort to switch, and even if they did they would end up re-creating the same thing that makes them miserable currently.
    - mike_d 1y ago
      You might need to expand your social circle a bit. If you asked normal average people "what's the biggest pain point in your life right now?" they would point to financial, societal, or health issues. The vast majority of people when asked specifically about their phones probably wish that they were a newer model or had a longer battery life. As long as it communicates with people, lets them access banking and social media, and has a few of their niche hobby/entertainment apps nobody actually cares about the licensing of the modem firmware or the fact you can't install TempleOS on it.
- beefnugs 1y ago
  The time is right: the building is burning down around us, time to buy a fire extinguisher
bigstrat2003 1y 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.
- endgame 1y ago
  It becomes much harder to force attestation on people if there's a significant user base that runs alternative operating systems.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    Do you really NEED to be forced to attest if you can make your phone look like any damn PC using a browser?
    - kube-system 1y ago
      I can’t tap my PC to buy a burrito at Chipotle.
      - ray_v 1y ago
        This sounds like a challenge to me.
        bitmasher9 1y ago
        It’s actually super easy and not a challenge. The lowest tech way to do it would be the tape a cc with tap functionality to the inside of a laptop.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
its-summertime 1y ago
https://librephone.fsf.org/FAQ.html https://librephone.fsf.org/FAQ.html Currently scope only seems to go as far as the operating system
- soupy-soup 1y 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_dos1 1y 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.
    - jancsika 1y ago
      Does webrender work with the Librem 5? Last time I checked it didn't-- Firefox disallowed it because the etnaviv driver didn't have all the features available needed to enable it. It appears there's been a lot of work on etnaviv recently but I don't know if it affects this issue.
      - seba_dos1 1y ago
        etnaviv doesn't do GLES3 yet, so no, but the work to support it (mostly done by Christian Gmeiner) is ongoing and progressing. I'm using Epiphany though, it's pretty snappy these days and I make extensive use of its webapp feature. I don't even remember when was the last time I had to fallback to Firefox because of some incompatibility, but it did happen at least once.
bsimpson 1y ago
Interesting that they chose Android as a base and not one of the desktop-Linux-for-mobile ports like postmarketOS.
- ACCount37 1y 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 1y ago
    waydroid
- ray_v 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  - drnick1 1y 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.
ACCount37 1y 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 1y ago
  Yep, with DMA sometimes. I've heard this same thing on the Pinephone forums iirc during the early years.
- hypercube33 1y 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 1y ago
  Not insurmountable, given the availability of srsRAN. https://www.srsran.com/ https://www.srsran.com/
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    But are you enough of a madman to port that onto an undocumented magic modem?
- kube-system 1y 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.
charcircuit 1y 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.
- tmtvl 1y 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.
  - Dylan16807 1y 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.
  - degamad 1y 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.)
  - charcircuit 1y 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 1y ago
Thank you John Gilmore.
zb3 1y 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..
- matheusmoreira 1y 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.
matheusmoreira 1y 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...
glitchc 1y 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
IlikeKitties 1y 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-system 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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-modem-gnu-linux-tpe-usb4g2us https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/usb-4g-lte-advanced-m...
  - seba_dos1 1y 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.
    - mrheosuper 1y ago
      HID USB devices can already wake up computer from sleep, so i dont think we need M2 here. Also i dont think routing audio is problem, the dongle could represent itself as external audio device, like those external usb dac.
      - seba_dos1 1y ago
        Of course it could! Now find one that does.
- tguvot 1y ago
  something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play
- numpad0 1y ago
positron26 1y ago
[flagged]
CMCDragonkai 1y 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-ethkl https://polykey.com/blog/architecting-anti-fragile-trust-at-...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
vectraMosaic64 1y ago
Two phones might be our sad reality, one for freedom, one for compliance.
kobieps 1y ago
Good to see someone fighting the fight
aussieguy1234 1y ago
I suppose my PC's BIOS is a binary blob, yet I run open source Linux on that machine.
- floxy 1y ago
  https://www.coreboot.org/ https://www.coreboot.org/
- fsflover 1y ago
  But do you trust that it obeys you and not three-letter agencies or hackers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine
vfclists 1y 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_dos1 1y 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".
  - vfclists 1y 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?
- drnick1 1y ago
  Someone hasn't read the article.
  - vfclists 1y ago
    These guys want to build on the Android foundation. I'm sorry but this will not work.
neilv 1y 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/ 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/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/ https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/
- nicman23 1y 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
  - linmob 1y 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.
    - nicman23 1y ago
      no i wont. it is literally that simple. the regular device has 3 gb of ram. the flagship has 4gb for 4k and released 4 years ago. also yeah i do try to avoid anything gtk but not for any particular reason. i just prefer qt.
nullbyte808 1y ago
I highly doubt this will takeoff. I'm betting it never works beyond a couple outdated phones.
- lovelearning 1y 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.
numpad0 1y ago
Why aren't they sending representatives to 6G standardization bodies? It's too late for 5G and under.
Worldblender 1y 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.
- r283492 1y 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.
- SchemaLoad 1y 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.
system2 1y ago
Let's hope the phone's ui won't look like FSF's website.
- realaaa 1y 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 1y 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.
wltr 1y ago
To me this feels like blah blah blah, but I’d love to be very wrong, of course.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
5y4ddb 1y ago
[dead]
z3ratul163071 1y ago
thank god.
pjmlp 1y 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 1y 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.
gorgoiler 1y 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-h 1y 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.
  - gorgoiler 1y ago
germandiago 1y ago
I am a fan! I have missed this for years.
BLKNSLVR 1y 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=45584498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585869 It's heartening.
squarefoot 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
cookiengineer 1y 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 1y 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
- rjdj377dhabsn 1y ago
  Why is eBPF a problem?
  - cookiengineer 1y 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 https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/bpf
jabl 1y 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.
jacquesm 1y ago
Getting governments, banks and other big entities to play along here is going to be the main challenge.
- le-mark 1y 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.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    I think that day arrived Jan. 6th 2025. If the message doesn't land now it never will.
permalac 1y 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 1y 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.
- rjdj377dhabsn 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
BaudouinVH 1y ago
dear FSF, let's discuss your https://librephone.fsf.org/ 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 https://librephone.surge.sh/librephone-website.html
- bluenose69 1y 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.
  - BaudouinVH 1y ago
    I use reader mode too. When I do it triggers a "imperfect lay-out" alarm.
whitehexagon 1y 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 1y 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_booze 1y 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 1y ago
  Congratulations, you just invented the open web circa 2006.
  - NoGravitas 1y ago
    Or FirefoxOS circa 2013.
- woodrowbarlow 1y 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_booze 1y 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.
tomtom302 1y ago
Tom is a liar
symbogra 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
snoweater98 1y ago
[dead]
ktosobcy 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
I guess it will be as successful as GNU Hurd and others.
misano 1y ago
It's too late when we are moving away from phones and shifting towards wearable technology.
charliebwrites 1y 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 1y 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/ https://furilabs.com/
- efreak 1y 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)
john01dav 1y 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 1y ago
FSF is a joke
DoctorOetker 1y 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 1y 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."
jajuuka 1y 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 1y 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 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 1y ago
I'm confused. Hasn't the Librephone been in stalled development for over a decade?
- Worldblender 1y 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.
marajason629 1y ago
[dead]
pkphilip 1y 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?

1586 points by g-b-r 1y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45562286

le-mark 1y 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-xmr 1y ago
If rich techies on this website want to support something worthwhile, here you go
- lostmsu 1y ago
  Not rich but is there a way to contribute specifically to this project? The donate button on the website does not work.
  - tjr 1y ago
    I would have expected an online means to contribute specifically to Librephone, but indeed, seems like nothing yet. Hopefully it is forthcoming. Otherwise, their website suggests you can specify a particular project via the memo line of a check: https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate/ https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate/
  - r283492 1y ago
    As the first project FSF has launched in years with a current budget of one developer I expect they will be happy to spend new donations on further funding for it. However, it is very uncommon for a nonprofit to have a separate fund for a project that is part of the organization itself, rather than a project which makes semi-independent decisions and is fiscally sponsored by a related nonprofit. The exception is usually when some very large donor which insists on that arrangement.
    - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
      I was talking to someone who is involved in a nature conservation nonprofit recently - small donations go into the general pot of money for the organization to choose how to spend it. If you want to influence what the money is used for you have to donate a significantly higher sum. They said they like having many small donors because they can fund things that don't necessarily make a big splash in a press release but are important precursors to impact (e.g. researching what projects would have the most impact vs actually implementing a project).
  - wltr 1y ago
    Upon commenting, I removed the snarky part of the website being visually… well, bad. After all, FSF isn’t about design and aesthetics, right? But donate button not working demonstrates the whole seriousness of the effort.
frogperson 1y 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.
- BLKNSLVR 1y 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 1y 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.
- jMyles 1y 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - scuff3d 1y ago
    Maybe, but that pain point isn't something free software is going to fix. Obviously not everyone has the same problems with their phone, but largely I think they fall into a few categories: notification overload, apps designed to keep you scrolling for every last minute of the day, and dark patterns or other design choices aimed at separating users from as much of their money as possible. Every single one of these is fixable on any modern phone. Stop using social media, take a hatchet to what apps can send you notifications and when, and be more mindful of what tricks are commonly deployed to steal your attention, time, and money. But people can't even manage that. They don't even have to do anything, they just have to stop doing certain things, but they can't or won't. Those same people aren't going to go through the effort to switch, and even if they did they would end up re-creating the same thing that makes them miserable currently.
  - mike_d 1y ago
    You might need to expand your social circle a bit. If you asked normal average people "what's the biggest pain point in your life right now?" they would point to financial, societal, or health issues. The vast majority of people when asked specifically about their phones probably wish that they were a newer model or had a longer battery life. As long as it communicates with people, lets them access banking and social media, and has a few of their niche hobby/entertainment apps nobody actually cares about the licensing of the modem firmware or the fact you can't install TempleOS on it.
beefnugs 1y ago
The time is right: the building is burning down around us, time to buy a fire extinguisher

bigstrat2003 1y 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.

endgame 1y ago
It becomes much harder to force attestation on people if there's a significant user base that runs alternative operating systems.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Do you really NEED to be forced to attest if you can make your phone look like any damn PC using a browser?
  - kube-system 1y ago
    I can’t tap my PC to buy a burrito at Chipotle.
    - ray_v 1y ago
      This sounds like a challenge to me.
      - bitmasher9 1y ago
        It’s actually super easy and not a challenge. The lowest tech way to do it would be the tape a cc with tap functionality to the inside of a laptop.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]

its-summertime 1y ago

https://librephone.fsf.org/FAQ.html https://librephone.fsf.org/FAQ.html Currently scope only seems to go as far as the operating system

soupy-soup 1y 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_dos1 1y 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.
  - jancsika 1y ago
    Does webrender work with the Librem 5? Last time I checked it didn't-- Firefox disallowed it because the etnaviv driver didn't have all the features available needed to enable it. It appears there's been a lot of work on etnaviv recently but I don't know if it affects this issue.
    - seba_dos1 1y ago
      etnaviv doesn't do GLES3 yet, so no, but the work to support it (mostly done by Christian Gmeiner) is ongoing and progressing. I'm using Epiphany though, it's pretty snappy these days and I make extensive use of its webapp feature. I don't even remember when was the last time I had to fallback to Firefox because of some incompatibility, but it did happen at least once.

bsimpson 1y ago

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

ACCount37 1y 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 1y ago
  waydroid
ray_v 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
- drnick1 1y 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.

ACCount37 1y 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 1y ago
Yep, with DMA sometimes. I've heard this same thing on the Pinephone forums iirc during the early years.
hypercube33 1y 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 1y ago
Not insurmountable, given the availability of srsRAN. https://www.srsran.com/ https://www.srsran.com/
- ACCount37 1y ago
  But are you enough of a madman to port that onto an undocumented magic modem?
kube-system 1y 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.

charcircuit 1y 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.

tmtvl 1y 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.
- Dylan16807 1y 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.
- degamad 1y 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.)
- charcircuit 1y 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 1y ago

Thank you John Gilmore.

zb3 1y 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..

matheusmoreira 1y 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.

matheusmoreira 1y 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...

glitchc 1y 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.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

IlikeKitties 1y 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-system 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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-modem-gnu-linux-tpe-usb4g2us https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/usb-4g-lte-advanced-m...
- seba_dos1 1y 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.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    HID USB devices can already wake up computer from sleep, so i dont think we need M2 here. Also i dont think routing audio is problem, the dongle could represent itself as external audio device, like those external usb dac.
    - seba_dos1 1y ago
      Of course it could! Now find one that does.
tguvot 1y ago
something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play
numpad0 1y ago

positron26 1y ago

[flagged]

CMCDragonkai 1y 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-ethkl https://polykey.com/blog/architecting-anti-fragile-trust-at-...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

vectraMosaic64 1y ago

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

kobieps 1y ago

Good to see someone fighting the fight

aussieguy1234 1y ago

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

floxy 1y ago
https://www.coreboot.org/ https://www.coreboot.org/
fsflover 1y ago
But do you trust that it obeys you and not three-letter agencies or hackers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

vfclists 1y 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_dos1 1y 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".
- vfclists 1y 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?
drnick1 1y ago
Someone hasn't read the article.
- vfclists 1y ago
  These guys want to build on the Android foundation. I'm sorry but this will not work.

neilv 1y 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/ 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/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/ https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/

nicman23 1y 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
- linmob 1y 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.
  - nicman23 1y ago
    no i wont. it is literally that simple. the regular device has 3 gb of ram. the flagship has 4gb for 4k and released 4 years ago. also yeah i do try to avoid anything gtk but not for any particular reason. i just prefer qt.

nullbyte808 1y ago

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

lovelearning 1y 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.

numpad0 1y ago

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

Worldblender 1y 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.

r283492 1y 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.
SchemaLoad 1y 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.

system2 1y ago

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

realaaa 1y 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 1y 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.

wltr 1y ago

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

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

5y4ddb 1y ago

[dead]

z3ratul163071 1y ago

thank god.

pjmlp 1y 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 1y 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.

gorgoiler 1y 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-h 1y 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.
- gorgoiler 1y ago

germandiago 1y ago

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

BLKNSLVR 1y 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=45584498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45585869 It's heartening.

squarefoot 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

cookiengineer 1y 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 1y 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
rjdj377dhabsn 1y ago
Why is eBPF a problem?
- cookiengineer 1y 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 https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/bpf

jabl 1y 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.

jacquesm 1y ago

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

le-mark 1y 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.
- jacquesm 1y ago
  I think that day arrived Jan. 6th 2025. If the message doesn't land now it never will.

permalac 1y 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 1y 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.

rjdj377dhabsn 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

BaudouinVH 1y ago

dear FSF, let's discuss your https://librephone.fsf.org/ 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 https://librephone.surge.sh/librephone-website.html

bluenose69 1y 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.
- BaudouinVH 1y ago
  I use reader mode too. When I do it triggers a "imperfect lay-out" alarm.

whitehexagon 1y 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 1y 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_booze 1y 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 1y ago
Congratulations, you just invented the open web circa 2006.
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Or FirefoxOS circa 2013.
woodrowbarlow 1y 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_booze 1y 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.

tomtom302 1y ago

Tom is a liar

symbogra 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.

snoweater98 1y ago

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ktosobcy 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

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

misano 1y ago

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

charliebwrites 1y 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 1y 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/ https://furilabs.com/

efreak 1y 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)

john01dav 1y 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 1y ago

FSF is a joke

DoctorOetker 1y 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 1y 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."

jajuuka 1y 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 1y 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 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 1y ago

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

Worldblender 1y 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.

marajason629 1y ago

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pkphilip 1y 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?