We desperately need this too. And it’s just not the proprietary blobs in the OS, but the hardware firmware, software below the OS as well.
By Brad Linder
We’ve seen a bunch of efforts to develop free and open source smartphone operating systems over the past decade. But most have relied on at least some proprietary drivers and other software – even on hardware like the Pinephone and Librem 5 smartphones that are designed to run mobile Linux distributions.
Now there’s a new initiative that aims to go even further. During its 40th birthday celebration earlier this month, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced a Librephone initiative with the goal of creating a platform that brings “full computing freedom” to mobile devices.
The announcement is pretty light on details. We know that it’ll be a partnership between the FSF and developer Rob Savoye, who “has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since the 1980s.”
And it seems like the goal isn’t to start from scratch, but to take an existing operating system like Android and reverse engineer all the proprietary components until it’s capable of running on smartphones and other mobile devices without relying on any proprietary drivers.
There are already a bunch of Android-based operating systems like GrapheneOS and /e/OS that have been “de-Googled” to remove proprietary apps and services like the Google Play Store. But these operating systems still rely on proprietary “blobs” to interact with some of the hardware on modern smartphones.
The same is true of mobile Linux distributions like postmarketOS, Mobian, and PureOS (and even more true of Ubuntu Touch and other Linux distros that rely on Android drivers rather than a mainstream Linux kernel).
But the Free Software Foundation is a no-compromise group when it comes to users’ freedom to inspect, modify, and have complete control over the software that runs on their devices, which is why the organization’s list of “entirely free” operating systems is so small (and populated by obscure names) compared to some more comprehensive lists of available Linux distros. The FSF also has a pretty short list of officially recommended hardware.
And that means that the Librephone project aims to go further toward enabling “full computing freedom” than existing Android or Linux-based mobile operating systems. It’s also unclear how long this could take, whether developers will ever succeed, or if the project might eventually be abandoned… which is what happened the last time the FSF tried to develop a “free phone operating system” back in 2017.
via ItsFOSS, FSF, and Hacker News