The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.
I salute the early adopters who will suffer all the inconveniences of startups so the wider public can enjoy a non-corporate phone in the future. o7
I’m looking forward to get one of these just to play around with it, and maybe making some custom stuff for it.
I’m looking forward to actually seeing how my fucking works and what it’s doing.
how my fucking works and what it’s doing.
I think only you can answer that one, friend
As soon as my current phone is paid off I am going to get this. No more fucking Spyware up the ass.
The project just launched and is a software-first project. We won’t see a Libre Phone available for a while yet.
And if Hurd is any indication I wouldn’t hold my breath.
That said, didn’t hird basically die because Linux gained critical mass faster and peeled off the core developers? It would be nice to imagine another bottom-up mobile OS emerging and stealing the thunder of this one, but it seems like the hope here is that Libre Phone will gravitate in some of the devs from the existing top-down open phone projects. Who knows if that will work.
One thing I wouldn’t count out right now though: China is very much in favor of getting software and hardware monopolies out from the control of US companies. Free/open(ish) LLMs are the big example, maybe they will jump on this to try and break Google’s stranglehold on the mobile market.
It isn’t encouraging that they “launched” the initiative bit have no dedicated webpage or git for it yet. Seems like going off half-cocked
Then I will make do until then.
Unless they can get this working with Android Auto or Carplay I don;t see it going anywhere.
Nah, fuck that.
I’d rather see Linux on the head unit, too.
I’d still want an Android Auto and Apple Carplay equivalent.
I want my 2030 car to still be able to get the latest and greatest hardware and software in 2040 via me upgrading my phone.
Fuck cars
Nah many people don’t live in their cars. I have 2 cars and never use Android Auto even when I could. I’m usually busy with driving instead of fooling with phone bullshit when I’m in the car anyway.
Not everyone has a car y’know. Actually I don’t even know anyone who does.
Tell me more about the phone! This has taken so long and I am ready to migrate to an open phone even if it’s only for texting at this point.
Screw this OS monopoly by Apple and Alphabet.
Open to simple solutions here. I have a Pixel 4a 5g and iPhone 15 Pro* atm.
your pixel probably runs graphene, degoogle it.
you could probably run linux on it today too.
GrapheneOS for Pixel 4a 5G is deprecated.
What’s keeping me from doing this is that i won’t be able to run my banking apps anymore then. And I can’t be arsed to carry two phones
Graphene is actually better than most custom ROMs in that it can contain Play Services and a few other apps, effectively acting as 2 phones in one. Where I’m from, banking apps don’t need strong Play Integrity, just Play Services.
linux phones will never run banking apps either.
Perhaps there’s this magic app called a “web-browser” I could introduce you to…
banking doesn’t work on just web browsers anymore on most of the world’s banks. i WISH.
Huh, they still work for all my banks here in the US. Not sure how you’re supposed to access your bank account on your PC otherwise. Some banks you’ll have to use the “use Desktop version of the site” option in a mobile browser to get it to work, but it will still work.
access your bank account on your PC otherwise
we’re not. not without a phone.
Damn, that actually sucks.
Especially when virtualization options are expensive/unavailable on mobile CPUs.
atm i use the one bank that doesn’t enforce root for the 2fa portion of the app.
that will soon not be an option though, i guess i’m gonna need two phones now.
I mean, carrying two phones would defeat most of the purpose anyway if one isn’t degoogled in the first place, they’re still getting all that tracking and they’ll be able to associate it with all the online activity of your degoogled phone that’s conveniently always in the same location.
Install waydroid or something or use the browser. The more you put off switching the worse it’s going to get for everyone. You can also just keep another phone in your car on airplane mode and connect it to your hotspot when you need to check your account. There are ways I guess.
Well it might not even be a phone, maybe it’s only a software project that needs to partner with manufacturers that would include it in their phones. The article doesn’t really mention much.
Either way, I’m starting to get excited.
I’d love to try it, but I imagine it will take 20 years for something like this to come even close to usable as a daily driver.
I hope they can pull this off because we really need this.
Heard of Hurd, I don’t think they can.
Maybe Hurd never went anywhere but they are responsible for as much of what constitutes “Linux” as the Linux kernel is. Linux never would have amounted to much without GCC, the GNU tools, and the GPL.
This is the original article
https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-turns-forty-with-a-new-president-and-a-new-campaign
Oooh, I wonder if they’re going to pursue a free phone based on Risc-V. It’s a longshot but if they pull that off, it’d be like feeding two birds with one scone.
The only way to sucdeed here is to legally force all phones to have unlocked bootloader.
This isn’t even the worst problem. O think the biggest one is proprietary blob drivers, that kills the possibility of keep your phone updated and a general solution that works for most phones instead of an ad-hoc hack for each one.
I disagree - all of those are solvable if the core platform is free
I really hope this is super based
Hopefully this will recruit projects that already have significant headstart, such as Pine64. Otherwise, it would merely be performative.
I’ve got a Google Pixel 3a with postmarketOS installed on it right now for testing, and it really is a two-pronged issue with both hardware and software. Because it’s an older phone the battery drains within a few hours, nowhere close to all-day use. Because most of the software is designed for the desktop certain things are just impossible to use (the big pain point for me is Anki, but on the other hand it’s impressive how many GTK apps conform very nicely to the screen). The keyboard still feels pretty rough.
Hopefully the FSF dipping their hat into the ring will help existing projects like this in a rising-tide-raises-all-ships sort of way. Would be a shame for them to put effort into a software stack that goes nowhere (GNU Hurd), and pour $$$ into a hardware project that doesn’t make it to market or doesn’t do its job better than a cracked smartphone from 5+ years ago.
I think it is possible to switch to it now and have things mostly work out for you, but it will make your life harder. I remember switching to Ubuntu around 2010 and it’s almost to that level of experience. You’ll be giving up a lot, apps you “need” won’t work, but it’s at the point where it is a complete usable experience. For those that are willing to suffer for FOSS, I mean.
For all of those following, I emailed Rob and he confirmed that the focus of the project to start is reverse engineering binary blobs on existing android devices, but he is currently only at the discovery phase of picking which phones to start with. He is first checking LineageOS compatible phones using his toolset here: https://codeberg.org/rsavoye/librephone/src/branch/main/doc/index.md
Just because it’s a libre phone, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a linux phone. Or at least any more so than Android is a linux phone because it uses a heavily modified (almost unrecognizable) linux kernel.
There’s nothing in the article that says they’re just going to use a mainline linux kernel and throw a touch optimized version of some existing desktop on it (ubuntu touch, etc…)
Heck, they could be meaning that they’re planning on making their own heavily modified kernel for their very own OS so as to skip all of the trouble that trying to make mainline linux into a handheld device has been so far. (similar to I believe how SailfishOS is doing it)
Finally, a GNU/Hurd phone! /s
Why couldn’t they just use usual Linux for that? Why a modified kernel? Is Linux as is not suitable for a phone?
Can’t they just, idk, make a distro? Maybe from scratch? Pop!_OS is working on COSMIC. Can’t they have their Linux-based OS, perhaps with its own things as needed, such as a phone-optimised DE? Or whatever the phone equivalent of a DESKTOP environment would be. A Mobile Environment, perhaps
If my laptop had touch screen with no other method of input built in, and were way smaller, could it not run Linux? Or is that different altogether?
Too many bits of a smartphone are proprietary hardware without open drivers.
I would assume that’s the bit they’re working on, otherwise there’s no real point to the project IMO.
Linux by design gives the user enough rope to hang themselves with.
And that’s certainly not a problem when dealing with tech enthusiasts who know what, when and where to touch to avoid messing things up. But when you’re dealing with getting a phone into the hands of ordinary people, that isn’t going to fly because all of those people will at some point start mucking around inside and then expect tech support when they mess up.
For mainstream adoption, the linux kernel must and the desktop environment must be at least somewhat locked down.
We have immutable distributions already, that is something that isn’t a problem. It’s replacing those pesky proprietary blobs used to talk to the hardware that is a headache.
Between capabilities, namespaces, control groups, mandatory access control (AppArmor etc) and other mechanisms, I think there are plenty of ways to reduce user access to any part of the system.
Just because it’s a libre phone, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a linux phone.
Likewise, a so-called “Linux phone” isn’t necessarily a libre phone, either. But, I don’t care about Linux, I care about freedom, so a LibrePhone is important regardless of what Linux fans think of it, and if it is truly worthy of the word libre, it will be able to run your so-called “real Linux.”
Does anyone claim so? And does it matter much outside of (potentially) app support?
I swear they unveiled the libre phone 10 years ago.
I have a Purism Librem 5 phone which is fully FOSS Linux phone.
The name keeps throwing me off lol
I mean when I was looking up there have been people that have been using the term libre phone for somewhere around a decade or so. Hell I found an old Reddit post from 8 years ago that talked about asking if it’d be possible to make a pure libre phone. And then of course it came across the Lebrim 5 that you mentioned there so I’m sure they originally used that term as well.
Incidentally what do you think of the phone do you have just the standard one or do you have that premium one?
Damn. Software has existed 40 years now?
Not only that: it was big enough to get mad at 40 years ago already.
40 years ago was 1985.
The first version of Microsoft Windows was released at that time, as an GUI overlay of MS-DOS.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_WindowsMS-DOS was released in 1981 as a corporate locked down OS, that he was aggressively pushing to lock down the PC market.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOSAt the same time HP, IBM, and other early computing megacorps were pushing their own locked down OS’s that were partially built off the free software work of the universities.
One example is HP-UX, which was released in 1984 and was a proprietary implementation of Unix System V, which itself was a commercial product from AT&T. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V
Things were extremely expensive and locked down back then, and we were just getting to the point where computers were becoming common in people’s homes. Most decently funded schools had dedicated computer labs at this point.
What a nice thing to do
I guess I’ll see phones with this in my local stores at… 10 years? Too generous, maybe 15.
