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.
A dedicated community has been created for this, see https://lemmy.ml/c/librephone (I just saw this community and joined myself)
I’m trying to fund these projects. It might not be much, but but a little bit now and then might make a difference.
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.
The day a open source project has good marketing is the day the end of the world happens.
It’s just impossible for some reason.
Agree. Marketing isn’t really the in the wheelhouse of most Linux/open source projects.
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.
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
You’re probably right
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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.
This is amazing news!
I’m glad the fsf is actually taking it upon itself to create more solutions especially since it has become increasingly irrelevant throughout these years and sadly been replaced by the corporate “open source” hellscape.
We need free software, not “open source” corporate bullshit. Open source was invented in the first place as a way to get people from being radicalized by the free software movement, since it would take money out of their filthy, greedy pockets.
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.
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.
Good for now *
