FSF Announces the LibrePhone Project (phoronix.com) 67
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched the LibrePhone Project, an initiative to create a fully free and open-source mobile operating system that eliminates proprietary firmware and binary blobs. From the FSF: "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.
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Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS." The project site can be found here.
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Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS." The project site can be found here.
Interesting Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
This is 100% going to require dedicated / custom hardware no matter what. Most phones have multiple important devices that need binary blobs. Most often that includes the cellular radio, so a normal phone with this system is going to be a brick with this.
There have, through history, been a bunch of projects for better / more free / more user owned phones. Fairphone, Purism / Librem / PinePhone and several of them delivered hardware. So far that's always been noticeably more expensive for worse hardware, but it shows it can and will be done. Now that Google looks like they will close off the hardware support for Pixel phones in AOSP, the GrapheneOS project are talking about doing a phone with an OEM so maybe we will end up with something much more competitive soon.
This kind of project can give a focus for getting one of those phones you more or less own actually over the line to the state where you really own it and have all the drivers.
Re:Interesting Idea (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is the modems. If the firmware can be modified, it can be made to exceed legal transmission power limits, or behave badly on the network in a way that affects other users.
The same is true of WiFi, but the damage tends to be more limited. Screwing up a cell tower can affect thousands of people.
Re:Interesting Idea (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's illegal to run such a modified firmware. That shouldn't stop the FSF from releasing free firmware.
Re:Interesting Idea (Score:5, Informative)
True, but it will stop the hardware vendors helping them. They typically have a binary blob, and maybe it has to be validated with a signature before loading. Blob itself is probably encrypted to make reverse engineering difficult.
Cellular and WiFi modems are complex DSPs. Figuring out how they work and re-writing the stack from scratch is a huge undertaking. I'm just not sure it's a realistic goal for the FSF. Their other attempts to open up less complex systems haven't exactly had stellar results.
Re:Interesting Idea (Score:4, Informative)
It is kind of accepted in Libre software circles that connecting the modem through USB is "good enough" to keep the rest of the device Libre.
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Software defined radios already exist in various form factors and powers. I saw one in a walkie-talkie form factor a year or so ago with a range listed in miles and it could operate in cell bands. Point is, such things already exist in the mass market, and they're pretty dang cheap.
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Yes, and it's a developing issue. But also we aren't quite at the stage where people can download an app to their phone and screw up the local cell tower. If we were, you can be sure something would be done about it.
In fact when someone found you could screw with Bluetooth quick pairing using a Flipper Zero, it was patched pretty quickly.
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You're making a rather large assumption there. I, for one, highly doubt that you could just "download an app to their phone and screw up the local cell tower". In fact, as an end user, I wouldn't even want this.
What the FSF is proposing (and hopefully eventually succeeding) is making some open firmware. Just because the firmware code is open doesn't mean every app (even if granted root access) in userspace will have unfettered access to everything the hardware radio could potentially do. There should be saf
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Screwing up a cell tower can affect thousands of people
You can't screw up a cell tower by boosting the pathetically tiny signal of a mobile phone. What you could do is interfere with devices in your immediate vicinity, but thanks to inverse square law you're likely to affect 2-3 people at the most, and all they need to do is take a step away from you.
Hint: If two phones right next to each other on a table work fine, then a phone that is well over 10x the power output it should normally be capable of won't affect another in the pocket of the person standing oppo
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I suspect phone manufacturers
What phone manufacturers? Locking down bootloaders is a thing some do and some don't. Non-manufacturer controlled Operating Systems do exist and are in use on many devices. Additionally some manufacturers exist to provide open options to customers such as FairPhone.
Nothing in the mobile world changes with this announcement. If there's a cat and mouse game to be had then it is already ongoing. An example of everything you list as a problem is right there in TFS, LineageOS which itself has roots that date bac
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I suspect phone manufacturers
What phone manufacturers? Locking down bootloaders is a thing some do and some don't. Non-manufacturer controlled Operating Systems do exist and are in use on many devices. Additionally some manufacturers exist to provide open options to customers such as FairPhone.
Nothing in the mobile world changes with this announcement. If there's a cat and mouse game to be had then it is already ongoing. An example of everything you list as a problem is right there in TFS, LineageOS which itself has roots that date back 15 years at this point.
I realize those devices exit, but how many offer the features of phones at or near teh top of the market? Unless it can match that, it will remain merely neat tech used by a few diehards.
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The Fairphone devices are perfectly capable high end devices. LineageOS arguably offers more than stock Android does. I'm not sure what you're asking here. Of course none of this has to do with adoption. This will definitely be niche. Virtually everything not shipped by Apple, Google, or Samsung is almost relegated to niche.
Incidentally this being niche is also why hardware vendors largely don't give a crap about it.
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I suspect phone manufacturers will attempt to find ways to block installing it on their devices
I suspect they'll just ignore it because no one will want to actually use it.
The problem with these ideology-based projects is that they have no mass appeal. No one out there in userland gives a flying fuck about free software. They want the latest apps. They want a seamless experience. Especially Gen Z who were raised on mobile devices. Tell them that they should give up iPhones and Android phones because "Free as in Freedom is the right way", and they're going to look at you like you're a tentacled thing
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Nah, the problem is the firmware blobs themselves. Every radio requires firmware blobs. 3G, 4G, 5G, WiFi, Bluetooth, all firmware blobs.
All USB, firmware blobs. This is by design.
The best you can hope for from a "libre" phone is a linux desktop OS running the android drivers on an Android platform. FSF does not have leverage to hardware manufacturers to GFY. That would have to come from the Linux Kernel devs, and even then, that would just push hardware manufacturing back to OS's like Symbian and QNX.
ROTFL (Score:2)
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Why don't start first by making GNU Hurd is fully functional, and not try to replace an OS that is already FOSS and has wide app adaptation, like Android? And yes, there are bolt-ons like the Google add-ons, but with the FOSS Google replacement plugins, you can get a largely functional FOSS phone. Maybe the FSF could focus on plugging those holes instead of starting from scratch.
Because starting from scratch lets you thump your chest and say "See what we did" vs. the relatively obscure and often thankless task of making something existing better under the hood?
get over yourself its called android no google (Score:2)
so how about funding
https://grapheneos.org/ [grapheneos.org]
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GrapheneOS is not GPL, sadly.
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The main body of the OS inherits from AOSP so you are right, but the kernel is still Linux so GPLv2. That's where the main body of work for LibrePhone would be.
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so how about funding
GrapheneOS doesnt' have the same aim. They happily run on Pixel hardware with binary blobs. In principle this project could be good for though because if the binary blobs can be eliminated then it would be possible to provide hardware support after Google has given up, so GrapheneOS could extend the lifetime of devices considerably.
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They're talking about LineageOS. Think Graphene but it doesn't just run on Google hardware. Over a hundred devices and they just added mainline kernel and qemu support so it potentially runs on thousands of devices.
Sadly with less hardening. I wish Lineage would take some Graphene patches. The crazy thing is Lineage descended from Cyanogenmod which had many of these patches!
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This just sounds like rebranding the Replicant project?
Unless FSF are planning on partnering with hardware projects such Purism, Pinephone or Fairphone, I can't see them making any headway over what postmarketOS has achieved.
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Those projects almost all only physical address hardware. This project is about replacing some binary blobs with free software and seems more interested in Androide based systems like LineageOS and similar systems than Linux base systems like postmarketOS. LineageOS already works, so just getting it working on any modern hardware without any binary blobs would be a great achievement. PostmarketOS could then copy that setup and and run on the same hardware, which would also be great.
Best of luck to them (Score:3)
It's really hard these day to be positive about things. I wish them the best of luck. Having a working, usable, open-source based phone sounds great. However, I can't shake off the few limitations that are likely to make this not viable for most people, beyond a general lack of interest in openness:
Those limitations can be lifted/worked around, and given the current trend, I'm ready to pay some premium for a phone that won't spy on me or dictate what I can and cannot do. But it has to work to begin with. Let's hope all this goes well.
Re:Best of luck to them (Score:5)
"Not having my bank app on Android makes doing anything hard already"
You do realise you can access almost all banks via the web too? And IME the web page is often more functional than the app which is why I don't bother with the banking app. Sure , using a browser is a bit more faff but I don't have to worry about possible theft of my money if my phone is unlocked when lost/stolen as I clear down all cookies on the browser.
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So I have to use the bank's web app.
Which only works with a hardware authentication device, which I have to have with me to use it.
Which is very annoying.
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Re:Best of luck to them (Score:5, Informative)
The number of things nowadays for which you need a phone app is staggering, from banking to credit card or even brokerage apps where the web interface is gimped or it just doesn't exist to all shop coupon apps, DHL locker apps, even health insurance and oh, this is a nasty one, the apps for charging your e-vehicle.
What's more, in the EU (and possibly some associated states from around too) you need to 2FA authorize the transactions in a way where you can see the amount and where it's going. That means none of the standard things like TOTP, FIDO2 (including any hardware key like the Yubico) meet the criteria, so you're down to SMS (yea, right) and phone app (no, don't ask me how doing everything on the phone counts as 2FA). So basically everyone does phone app, and even if you use a browser you still need the phone app. YES, there is also some other method where you have a separated device with battery, display, keyboard, some kind of chipcard reader, and some kind of optical reader (yes, seriously, and it isn't a phone...). When you need to do a transfer you put a chip card in that device, issue the transfer on the web, which presents you with some machine readable display, you read that with the reader, put some code with the keyboard, confirm the destination and the amount on the display of the device and then take a code from there and put it in the browser. It's very sound cryptographically but not everyone (not many, if any, depending on the country) offers it, and often comes with extra costs.
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"this is a nasty one, the apps for charging your e-vehicle"
If ICE vehicles had just been invented in the last few years I can guarantee that there'd be a different app not only for each oil/filling station company, but probably different sub apps for whether you need to fill up with petrol or diesel.
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It may be different. There is only a few ways to get fuel from a pump to the vehicle tank. Worst case, someone creates another hole on the top of the fuel tank for whatever they want to dump in. Electricity is different. It has to charge in a very specified manner, and what one vendor uses that works for them may cause another car maker's battery bank to detonate, so heavy DRM can be put in, with no effective or safe way to bypass it, especially with battery banks that use a large number of small cells.
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If ICE vehicles had just been invented in the last few years I can guarantee that there'd be a different app not only for each oil/filling station company, but probably different sub apps for whether you need to fill up with petrol or diesel.
This already exists in a fleet management world. My own company car I can only fill up using a card that limits me to the use of two specific brands of gas station. Funny enough when I changed to an EV I had far more flexibility as the charge card works with literally every single EV charger I've ever tried, including those from our biggest competitors.
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Logging in on the web to my bank requires generating a security code using the app.
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"almost" is doing a lot of work there. My bank info and their payments systems can only be accessed via their phone app.
My reaction to reading this news was that this isn't really viable if anyone using this has to have a second "normal" phone to function in society.
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And IME the web page is often more functional than the app
Huh? Either you're using a really shitty banking up, or you have a website that is frankly asking for a scary level of hardware access. Last I checked a website wasn't able to trigger NFC to authorise a payment terminal, didn't automatically scan codes from payment slips for payments, didn't manage QR code payment or 2FA authorisation.
I admit you and I use different banks, but to counter your anecdote the website of my bank has far less functionality than their app with the sole exclusion of opening a new a
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"Last I checked a website wasn't able to trigger NFC to authorise a payment terminal"
In world of comtactless cards NFC serves precisely zero purpose other than to be another way for crims to potentially rip you off if your phone is stolen and to piss off everyone else in the queue when the reader takes 5 times longer to read the phone than it would a card.
Re:Best of luck to them - use web too (Score:2)
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"Not having my bank app on Android makes doing anything hard already"
You do realise you can access almost all banks via the web too? And IME the web page is often more functional than the app which is why I don't bother with the banking app. Sure , using a browser is a bit more faff but I don't have to worry about possible theft of my money if my phone is unlocked when lost/stolen as I clear down all cookies on the browser.
My bank demands that I sign in using their phone app before they will allow me to access my account through their web page. Yes, I know it's stupid.
(Commonwealth Bank, so others know who to avoid)
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I always assumed this was the case, but I had my bank's customer service tell me that the *only* way to set up a third party payment with my bank account was through their app. I tried on the website and got nowhere. It's gross.
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All of my banking apps (and I have a bunch) accept working on GrapheneOS. Even if Librephone doesn't themselves attempt to pass verification then a GrapheneOS build for whatever hardware they support would be able to work with their kernel drivers.
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I have no idea how this pans out, but I'd imagine their first phone won't be a smart phone. They've got far too many 'low level' issues to work out first, and even getting hardware which doesn't need a manufacturer's binary blob to make it work is already a significant challenge. The subject of apps, app stores and operating systems will likely come later.
As others have said, the low level radios and modems have the capacity to be a real problem for networks. Most networks are held together with sticky tape
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Correct, this is the acid test. Can I do everything on a LibrePhone that I could before? NFC credit card tap-to-pay, banking, transit apps, government ID/drivers license, TFA?
All power to FSF and good luck opposing the Leviathan.
Relationship to Replicant and other projects ? (Score:1)
Re:Relationship to Replicant and other projects ? (Score:4, Informative)
The announcement on the FSF web site explicitly mentions Replicant and on the Replicant web site they still seem to be alive, but they are targeting different / older hardware. The announcement also mentions that the project sponsor wants to get rid of binary blobs in his LineageOS install.
My understanding: Replicant is a full AOSP distribution with the binary blobs removed. Librephone is a project trying to eliminate binary blobs in the underlying Linux kernel. When Librephone succeeds it will be easier to move Replicant to more devices.
Google is going to lock down Android (Score:3)
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Ironically the main choices I can think of are:
- if DIY a Pixel - they most reliably come with unlockable bootloader, no shenanigans at all to unlock it (and lock it back with your system), have most/all hardware well supported and so on ... drumroll ... Huawei !!!!!
- if you want something off the shelf from any somehow known entity it can't be something with Google Play (as it comes with all Google's restrictions) so you're mostly down to
It is mind boggling that
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Ironically the main choices I can think of are:
- if DIY a Pixel - they most reliably come with unlockable bootloader,
No. Google just took the Pixel device trees out of AOSP and is not publishing them elsewhere. Alternate OSes for Pixel devices just died.
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Any more suited alternative? At least you have all the existing code, and access to the device (which is absolutely NOT granted with most manufacturers). I guess you could do Fairphone, but still probably any Pixel from 6 and above (let's say you use one of the previous ones so it's better supported with existing code) would be better than any Fairphone for the foreseeable future.
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We're going to have to hope this project pans out, I guess. I used to run Familiar linux with GPE (gnome-based) desktop on my HP Ipaq... H2215 I think? It had what was then the fastest mobile ARM processor, the Intel PXA255. Unfortunately it was power hungry so I had to have a big stupid battery.
ANYHOO they had phone versions of those PocketPC devices, and you could run Linux on those as well.
For the time being, I guess I'm stuck on Android. I have an app library there I'd rather not abandon, and I still wa
What hardware are they targeting? (Score:2)
If they want to create a free-as-in-freedom mobile phone OS of some sort that is actually useful, they will need hardware that the OS can run on (and hardware that you can actually connect to modern mobile networks and use to make calls, send messages, access the internet etc). What hardware are they trying to target?
Will this be like coreboot/libreboot/etc where it only works on old obsolete hardware that you can't easily just go and buy anymore or will it actually be usable on hardware I as a FOSS-loving
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The Purism Librem 5 and the Pine64 Pinephone, as well as anything listed as supported currently by Ubuntu Touch and PostmarketOS are probably good candidates for this. You can already use many of these right now with several different Linux distros as the reverse-engineering work has already largely been done, and the phones are already in the wild, people are using them, and some of them are indeed still available for sale new. By and large, they suck compared to the latest iPhone but you can't have everyt
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It doesn't matter if some other phone OS is built on open source principles or not, or even if it functionally usable in a limited way. If it doesn't have the apps it sucks.
Here is appropriate phone... (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry... (Score:4, Funny)
It's GNU/Hurd or nothing
I look forward to seeing it in 2045 (Score:4, Funny)
Tried before, went no where ... (Score:2)
This has been tired before, and ended no where ...
Anyone remember Openmoko [wikipedia.org] and the hype around it in the Open Source community?
There were also Nokia's Maemo [wikipedia.org] (before Nokia abandoned it and the underlying hand sets after that CEO took over) then the Linux Foundation's MeeGo [wikipedia.org].
I hope this effort succeeds though despite the odds.
Wrong Starting Point (Score:5, Insightful)
I swear, the FSF has no concept of onramps, incremental victories, or provisional compromises.
Graphene, iode, and /e/OS exist, in addition to LineageOS. Are they "free enough" for the FSF? No, but to argue that the reason these things don't have mass acceptance is because users can't modify their modem firmware is patently absurd. I can appreciate the desire for purity, and a truly Free/Libre software stack from the low-level firmware to the apps, but this is absolutely the wrong starting point.
For starters, they could throw some funding toward F-Droid. Fund app development contests to improve availabilty of FOSS/FLOSS mobile apps. Users won't move off a proprietary OS if they *also* have to say goodbye to their massive app stack. If apps are available that will allow users to migrate their data to FOSS alternatives that are *also* available on a FOSS/FLOSS mobile OS, the migration path off Google Android becomes much easier to walk.
To double-down on this, the FSF could fund Creative Commons alternatives to Spotify and Netflix and maybe Tiktok or Instagram, and provide music and video streaming platforms for artists to post their music and movies (maybe with a self-hosted/federation option). Sure, it'll be a bit amateur at the beginning, but so was Youtube, and now entire careers exist because of it. If the FSF got behind these kinds of platforms, to the point of releasing iterations of streaming clients in the Google Play and Apple App Stores, it would chip away at the reasons *why* a FOSS/FLOSS operating system has such an uphill climb. Imperfectly, sure...but my wager is that more users would be willing to abandon iOS and Android if they already move over to independent streaming apps, than if the FSF's sales pitch is "you can modify your own firmware".
From there, again, onramps. Make a list of phones that pass certain criteria of freedom - 'copper' for phones with user-unlockable bootloaders and a commitment to release device trees within the first year, 'bronze' for phones that ship with unlockable bootloaders and release device trees on day-one for Lineage-and-friends to modify, 'silver' for phones that ship with unlocked bootloaders and officially supported mostly-Free Android builds with user instructions to load it, 'gold' for phones that ship with a mostly-free Android build out of the box, 'platinum' for phones that are FOSS everywhere except the modem (which has a documented API), and 'diamond' for 'no proprietary code anywhere, at all'. Hell, the FSF could probably make a few extra bucks reselling such phones at all the different levels, and let users decide the level of freedom they're looking for.
Ultimately, starting at the lowest level of the hardware stack might have its place, but it is of no virtue if the LibrePhone has no users (or worse, whose primary users are troublemakers who get IMEI runs blocklisted). Firmware is the least of the problems the FSF is facing, and while a staunch adherence to principles is laudable, it is of no virtue to have an OSS cellular modem that can't make phone calls or text messages because no telco will allow it. It is of no virtue to have a FLOSS laptop who spends its day storing data in Google Drive, acquired from Salesforce, and copied into Quickbooks Online, then going home and listening to Spotify and watching Disney+...and the phone landscape is exactly the same. Without a counterbalance of enabling users to meaningfully interact with their data without being beholden to proprietary systems, the FSF will be the poster child for winning the battle and losing the war.
Re: (Score:2)