I don’t care how we get there but I’d like to see a pic revolution of sorts for phones. I’m continuously let down by how quickly modern computing is being locked down. Unfortunately the opposite appears to be happening, PCs are becoming more phone like.

It all comes down to concentration of the industry. Open standards thrive when one company isn't able to just roll their own stack from the hardware all the way up to the applications; in-housing and locking-down thrive when one company is big enough to just do everything itself.

When Google was small it embraced an open OS, the open web, email, RSS, etc. Now it's big enough that it doesn't need (and therefore doesn't want) open technologies.

Real scary next step is locking all PCs to MS Cloud and preventing consumers from accessing high performance computers.

We need a way to manufacture our own computer hardware at home. We need hardware manufacturing to be as easy and democratized as free software development. Until then, we'll forever be at the mercy of these corporations.

That’s infeasible.

Do you expect to be able to press your own semiconductors?

Maybe one day someone will create new technology that will enable manufacturing electronics at home. I don't know.

Indeed. On the bright side PC gaming may save humanity.

You've obviously never read global chat in Chivalry 2. ;-)

I'd like that too, however outside the HN bubble this isn't anywhere close to possible.

How much of the HN bubble is already comfortably employeed by these giants at golden handcuff level salaries? I don't think I'd look for disruption to come from here.

Surely if there's one thing the HN bubble is capable of, it's rallying a critical mass of contributors around a project like this.

The HN bubble has intellect and skill, but certainly not the 10's of billions it would take to make a viable android/iOS competitor. At this scale only the government has the power to effect change.

Don't sell us too cheap:

People connected to "HN Bubble" controls hundreds of millions if not a few billions of dollars.

Not every of those dollars are liquid, far from that, but, in addition to the raw monetary value of certain people here HN also commands a lot of attention.

I wouldn't oversell HN either. Arguably the value of HN lies in how relatively few users it has compared to FB or Reddit. Bringing to market a competitor to android/iOS that everyone including your parents could and would use would cost literally tens of billions. HN doesn't have that much clout, nowhere close.

> would cost literally tens of billions

You keep saying this as if it was somehow true or relevant. At this stage, we have no real need for an OS that grandma will want to use. That can come later. She can stay on iOS/Android for the time being.

> that everyone including your parents could and would use would cost literally tens of billions.

We need a name for this, the classic "someones parents can't use it and therefore it can't work fallacy".

My parents don't use Mac.

In fact most people don't, including me.

Doesn't prevent Mac from being a huge success and a viable platform for developers.

Same with a good number of applications: A few hundred or thousand hard core users. Bonus if one of them is an oil giant, a defense giant, the armed forces of a wealthy country or something.

At this stage, contributing to Mobian is not a matter of writing "apps". It's more of a boring job of hardware enablement and bringup on existing devices, probably best coordinated via postmarketOS (which has a successful history of upstreaming support to the mainline Linux kernel). The differences between pmOS and Mobian are comparatively trivial, so any work done on the former can easily benefit the whole FLOSS ecosystem.

While I love the FLOSS ecosystem I don't see how it's anything but a rounding error for consumer electronics. Unless there was a massive societal shift I don't see any future that includes a plurality of users owning FLOSS PC's or phones. The best place to start would be to get software freedoms included in the school curriculum.

We don't need a plurality share of the market, we just need it to be useful for power users, like FLOSS operating systems on PC are today. That will make for a great starting point already - disruptive innovation will do the rest.

This has got to be absolute peak HN bubble.

OS's success is almost entirely defined by network effects. This is why the UNIX wars ended with everyone using Linux. It was available (for free) and lots of people used it. It wasn't better in any way, that came later. 'Disruptive innovation' in software is a myth.

'Power users' on HN are 95% software developers who have a very good experience with FLOSS because everything from the OS to the apps is written by them for them. This is absolutely not the case for anyone else. The number one reason people don't use FLOSS is because they can't get Adobe and MS Office. Without users FLOSS will never get these. Until FLOSS products are the plurality available on store shelves it will never reach the mass market. No one who isn't a software developer is switching to FLOSS and without a massive restructuring of society that will remain the case. I just wish we could be more realistic and work on finding strategies that would actually move the needle. Chiefly by lobbying governments.

> This is why the UNIX wars ended with everyone using Linux. It was available (for free) and lots of people used it.

Right, which is more than you can say today about Android given the reality of current mobile hardware lifecycles. Make Linux-for-mobile available today, and people will gladly use it to extend the usability of their otherwise "obsolete" devices. The overall setting is in fact remarkably similar.

I would very much enjoy seeing you trying to teach my grandma who has a deep fear of technology to install Linux on her obsolete iPhone.

Google would block access to its services from that os. Just like they did with windows mobile. And that would be the end of it.

The companies in the best place to do this would be the chipset vendors, who essentially do all the work for Android already. However I don't see the incentive, there are probably legal obstacles, and finally companies generally fail at trying to replace their customers.

> who essentially do all the work for Android already

They don't, that's the whole point. They do the bare minimum of booting up a barely-usable, heavily hacked downstream kernel, and call it a day (or rather, move to the next device release). "Proper" support is left to the community.

Look, I kind of agree with the sentiment, but I think your comment doesn't paint a very realistic picture of the situation. I'd estimate that there are above 3 orders of magnitude more people working on Android at the chip vendors than there are people working in the community. Which, these days, includes quite a lot of user space work, as well as the kernel.

Essentially, any phone vendors other than the big names expects to get a fully-working Android image with their chipset to ship with the phone. And Google also punted a bunch of lower-end userspace work off on the chip vendors as well. Chip Vendors don't just ship drivers in that market. Not if they expect to sell any chips.

Source: Worked at a chip vendor.

OK then, replace "kernel" in my previous comment with "kernel plus a bunch of lower-level userspace". If anything, this makes things worse not better. It means we're re-introducing the possibility of duplicated effort and gratuitous breaks of compatibility in that lower-level userspace, which is exactly what we were trying to get away from via AOSP.

This makes it more important rather than less to work on an AOSP alternative that's far more in line with existing Linux practices in the mainstream, non-embedded ecosystem. And let's face reality, the chip vendors aren't doing it.

Sure. But what happened in non-embedded was that a lot of the chip vendors were eventually persuaded to lend their support to the Linux ecosystem. If that doesn't happen in mobile, the community faces an uphill struggle.

The chip vendors came around because the community was standing behind the ecosystem, not for any other reason. We've been through this before.