FSF announces Librephone project

a year ago by Jure Repinc to c/linux

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.

bobo1900 79 points a year ago

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.

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the_q 49 points a year ago

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non_burglar 21 points a year ago

Google is what happens when good marketing meets OSS, so careful what you wish for.

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meekah 9 points a year ago

Do you think good marketing necessarily leads to unethical business practices?

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non_burglar 21 points a year ago

<gestures at all the enshittified software products from the last 30 years>

In our current economic philosophy, yes.

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Ferk 2 points a year ago

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.

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UltraGiGaGigantic 1 point a year ago

Marketing is unethical because it is consentless

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davetortoise 2 points a year ago

And thank god it isn't

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the_q 6 points a year ago

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davetortoise 4 points a year ago

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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EponymousBosh 23 points a year ago

Honest to God, I thought a "Librephone" was something that already existed. I think I was thinking of the PinePhone or smth.

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ProgrammingSocks 15 points a year ago

Librem 5 is what you're thinking of

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EponymousBosh 3 points a year ago

You're probably right

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arox 1 point a year ago

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Holytimes 1 point a year ago

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.

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majster 28 points a year ago

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.

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iopq 19 points a year ago

So they could do it for pixels and this open source firmware could be used by Graphene OS, for example?

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Peasley 10 points a year ago

Yes, though the future of GrapheneOS on Pixels after 10 is currently in question

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TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe 6 points a year ago

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.

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ExtremeUnicorn 3 points a year ago

There's a bit of hyperbolism and distortion in that comment.

So first of all, the FSF did not create Libreboot, that was just a coreboot distribution by one (or two) people and I would not call it shitty, it had prebuilt binaries with working GRUB configs for the models supported, even allowing for full disk encryption with a well written guide on how to do so.

Secondly, it's hard to create a chain of trust without trusing the hardware. As long as the manufacturer remains in control of any part of it, you will get the same situation thay we have now. I would rather use a deblobbed device than wait for obscure security features that provide no real-world benefit to my use case.

However, I think this may not catch on. Hundreds of millions of people use completely outdated phones with spyware of some form on them right now, they simply don't care.

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TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe 1 point a year ago

FSF did not create Libreboot

Indeed (as I said) they did not create it, they made a shittier version of it, called GNU boot. Or I guess maybe not "the FSF" but devs under their umbrella. I think Linux Libre would be a better example. Or all the crappy "FSF approved" distros listed on their website.

it’s hard to create a chain of trust without trusting the hardware

That's true but that's not really their stance. They trust the hardware and the software running on said device, as long as they don't have access to the software. Microcode updates are an example of this. They don't like microcode "blobs" in the kernel but trust the outdated vulnerable microcode running on their CPU.

I would rather use a deblobbed device than wait for obscure security features that provide no real-world benefit to my use case.

I would not. I would prefer not to get hacked by spectre type attack. I also don't like broken virtualization on my CPU and don't want my CPU to destroy itself by high voltage.

But yes, I agree that to trust the software, we need to trust the hardware first. This also means that there is basically no "Respects Your Freedom" hardware. Every such hardware runs proprietary software which the user cannot see. And even if it ran no such software, it's still just proprietary hardware, which we cannot study, create derivatives, etc. If I ran the FSF, I would acknowledge that there is nothing but grey area, instead of drawing an arbitrary line through the grey area.

Going back to phones, I am just worried that the Librephone project will focus too much on moving the proprietary parts from software to the hardware instead of actually helping users to get more freedom.

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LeFantome 1 point a year ago

The FSF approach the microcode is just brain dead.

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Jankatarch 3 points a year ago

I don't know as much about phones as I do with computers but would I still be able to contribute in any way?

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MrSulu 2 points a year ago

I'm trying to fund these projects. It might not be much, but but a little bit now and then might make a difference.

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vas 1 point a year ago

A dedicated community has been created for this, see https://lemmy.ml/c/librephone (I just saw this community and joined myself)

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loxdogs -4 points a year ago

As long it is not liberated hardware from blobs it all is useless.

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hamsda 16 points a year ago

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.

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solardirus 1 point a year ago

Good for now *

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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