The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced its project to bring mobile phone freedom to users. “Librephone” is an initiative to reverse-engineer obstacles preventing mobile phone freedom until its goal is achieved.
Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones.
As long it is not liberated hardware from blobs it all is useless.
If you don’t want to have any freedom until you have it all, you’ll be slave forever.
You’re letting perfect get in the way of good enough.
Not a good choice for a name, at first I though it was just another linux phone that would be useless for 90% of people.
Very cool project instead, hope this can lead the fondation for a 100% open source mobile OS.
Honest to God, I thought a “Librephone” was something that already existed. I think I was thinking of the PinePhone or smth.
Librem 5 is what you’re thinking of
Agree. Marketing isn’t really the in the wheelhouse of most Linux/open source projects.
Google is what happens when good marketing meets OSS, so careful what you wish for.
Do you think good marketing necessarily leads to unethical business practices?
Marketing is unethical because it is consentless
Doesn’t have to be. Marketing also includes a website, that you as a user need to consciously visit to see, which I would definitely consider consensual.
Commercials like billboards are a different story, those definitely suck
I feel it’s a bit like the usability vs security dilemma… you can try to optimize to have both, but then you won’t have as a result neither the most secure system nor the smoothest user-friendly experience, but something in between (you might still consider that “secure” or “usable”, but that just depends on where you set your expectations).
If you want to maximize marketing then the result won’t be as ethical as it could be, and if you want to maximize ethics then the result won’t be as marketable as it could be.
good marketing does not require maximizing it, I think. I see where you’re coming from though, any effort spent on marketing could have been spent to create a better product. Having the perfect product is useless when nobody knows about it, though, so as always there is a balance to achieve.
<gestures at all the enshittified software products from the last 30 years>
In our current economic philosophy, yes.
I think you mentioned a keyword you’re ignoring here: product. This enshittification happens in a commercial environment. Good marketing does not require a commercial product.
Whatever it is you’re referring to here certainly doesn’t change the fact that the FSF sucks at marketing.
Which makes sense, since that is not what I was saying. I’m saying that a FOSS project with good marketing doesn’t necessarily become like google.
And thank god it isn’t
No I get that, and I agree for the most part, but do we want people outside our niche to use this stuff? If so then making it more palatable and accessible is important. Look at proton; it’s done amazing things for Linux adoption by lowering the fear factor that Linux has had for much of its life.
There’s a happy medium imo. Linux is enjoying a bit of a golden age at the moment because so many people are doing brilliant work making it usable and nice. But if the userbase becomes too large, tech companies will see their bottom lines affected, and it’ll be enshittified like everything else. And it’ll become a more attractive target for malware, of course.
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I think this intiative is spot on. I would describe current approach of 2 major OS vendors, Google and Microsoft as such:
Microsoft demands standardization at firmware level via UEFI, ACPI etc. because they bring OS kernel and userspace.
Google demands Linux API version and brings just userspace.
In theory Google approach better facilitates open ecosystem but each OEM treats Linux kernel as just a firmware blob so the end situation is actually worse.
On the PC we have standardized firmware while Android chases Linux API levels each release and thus undermines the whole ecosystem.
The project’s aim is to create an Android-compatible OS. I like the Linux-on-phone approach of postmarketOS better but whatever they end up working on should end up benefitting both projects since they’ll probably just be contributing driver code like postmarketOS. It’s weird that they don’t even mention postmarketOS in the announcement.
So they could do it for pixels and this open source firmware could be used by Graphene OS, for example?
The issue is that for the FSF, what they call “software freedom” is their number one goal. So what’s likely to happen is that they create some kind of “deblobbed” firmware that breaks many features and security of the device, which Graphene OS will refuse to use.
I hope this project will be useful but am worried that they’ll just make a shittier version of someone else’s work like they did with e.g. Libreboot.
Yes, though the future of GrapheneOS on Pixels after 10 is currently in question
