In your examples you compare Android rebuilds with real Linux distros. The projects also have quite different goals (providing full manufacturer ROM replacement for Android on Lineage OS to reusing any old hardware to basically run servers on PostmarketOS).
Most PostmarketOS devices start out using LineageOS kernels, and many are atill using those.
Why not use PostmarketOS kernels on LineageOS?
The ultimate goals are different, but cooperation on upstreaming kernel work would benefit both.
If we're talking about the mainline Linux, then it this looks exactly like a Lego to me. I hope that FSF will concentrate their efforts on that.
It's a mixed bag. The eBPF requirement makes it harder to support newer AOSP versions on very old downstream kernels (you now need a close-to-mainline port, like what pmOS aims to provide) but because it is a requirement, it will make it easier for newer devices to run a more up-to-date kernel starting from the available downstream sources.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27068-grapheneos-security-p...
I haven't heard of the FSF since the RMS affair but just the post reads very corporate and sterile.
Here is the problem: the FSF is at least 15 years late to really launch something in that space, they announce it because an old man on their board gave up some money so they could hire someone.
The FSF is now under the leadership of a "Bachelor of Arts degree in Media and Culture and a Master of Arts in the Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image" who probably hasn't written a line of code.
Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
The FSF looks a lot like most big "Open Source" foundations now, it is the sterile NGO model with most of its focus on public image, money and "coordinating". It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
We really need a free software phone, I hope people will donate and contribute to projects who really did something about it so far (the one not mentioned in this article).
But the problem is none of those foundations can raise enough money and hire enough people to compete in that space. It is not the right model.
Free Software is about vision, leadership and a lot of talented people freely contributing. I saw Stallman once "preaching" live at an event and telling us about the code he wrote, it was quite the experience. He is a weird guy but 1 hour of him speaking would have more impact than any MBA or Bachelor of Art type being paid to fundraise and coordinate.
I don't know if that's actually true but it's clear what they're arguing here anyway.
So the ones in the field have passed a higher barrier and pressure and are more qualified than the p80 male.
This could be another spin on the topic ;)
After Stallman launched the GNU project, the emergence of GNU licensed kernel for x86 architecture was inevitable. It just happened that Linux became that kernel. Had it not, the GNU project folks led by rms would have inevitably made their own.
I'm not sure this is guaranteed. GNU and the FSF have absolutely provided an enormous amount to the concepts and implementation of OS software. No doubt about it. Without it Linux would not exist, but it doesn't mean that'd have resulted in a widely used GNU alternative.
BUT, GNU/FSF also has a long history of losing focus on coding and spending a lot of time on political and philosophical arguments. I think it more likely BSD may have headed to where linux ended up than GNU. Linux was successful because they moved forwards and arguments were settled relatively quickly (for better and worse), whereas Hurd got stuck in development hell as people argued over how pure the microkernel architecture should be, pushing away people who just wanted things to work - including volunteers. During the crucial period over the 1990s, open source software needed to get things done (kind of like a startup). There are videos out there of people speaking at conferences about their work on Linux, and RMS being in the audience interjecting that it's "GNU/Linux" every time Linux was uttered. Who wants to work in an environment like that?
Even today, people are looking at more and more alternatives to important GNU software because of stagnation or other technical merits. GCC has lately seen alternatives become more common, as an example.
This also ignores the hostility the FSF historically has/had towards the commercial industry. Torvalds largely accepted patches from anybody if the code worked as intended.
Maybe something could have come out, but my gut tells me that people would have gravitated to something else that worked.
Do you have any data which shows that the type of leadership must be so different which affects this? Because if not, then you can infer only one thing from that data, and not what you did.
Are you saying that women with that qualification have the same opportunities as men without external intervention? Then why did you even bring up sex, and why I need to show you how to express it?
It is not about being "like him", he was just some fat old man with a big beard and I remember thinking he probably smells pretty bad. What was broad and inspiring was his vision and leadership as an human.
I still think that the FSF needs a strong character with a clear vision, man or woman, but maybe with less orthodoxy than RMS.
It doesn’t depend on external expression or validation.
Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc.
But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.
That might explain why the Scala Center (which oversees the Scala language) has a young political sciences grad as its executive director. She has zero commercial or academic experience in Scala.
And this is how she behaves at conferences:
https://x.com/jdegoes/status/1633888998434193411
Leftwing political activism, cancel culture and #metoo-style witchhunts (example: https://pretty.direct/statement )
This is what the Scala "community" has become. It's tragic, given how good the language is.
That there are non-technical leaders who lose the thread does not mean that leaders lose the thread because they're non-technical.
There are plenty of technical leaders who have also gone off on personal tangents and vendettas!
Maybe a more accurate appraisal would be 'some people suck at a job, and it's unfortunately difficult to dislodge a bad leader anywhere'.
Compare and contrast this:
> Say what you want about the Stalleman type he was very inspiring and had real leadership. So a lot of hackers followed him in his crazy vision and that gave us a lot.
With this:
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
It's a super sexist comment. A comment born in the 60s, or I guess in our geek land, still in 2025.
Is it?
To answer this, just reverse the genders in the statement and see if it's still sexist.
"It's very masculine and obviously doesn't work that well"
If you have problems with some type of behaviour it’s much better to say exactly what they are rather than appealing to some platonic notion of sex characteristics, which is both offensive and poorly communicates your position.
0. https://fortune.com/2025/01/13/zuckerberg-says-companies-nee...
Criticizing a woman for failure because of femininity falls nonetheless more into sexism than actual criticism of actions taken.
You really can't pick up on your own casual sexism? That's just evidence that this kind of anti-woman "femininity=weakness" language comes naturally to you.
Given this response, I would retract the accusation that you made a sexist statement, and instead conclude that you are a sexist person.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately been posting tons of flamewar comments to HN and clearly using the site primarily for this, so I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Not really. https://replicant.us is an FSF-supported project. But it kind of died due to the lack of contributors.
IMHO, postmarketOS is better than Replicant or any other Android Rom, because it doesn't depend on Android.
This is where the Stallman hard, radical and long term vision make a lot of sense in retrospect. Because we see now Google is pulling the rug.
and concentrate effort on the components that don't have this (ie. drivers, hardware, codecs, whatever), but instead what we got is 20 more years GnomeJS and whatnot.
Praise the Heavens that at-least 3/10 staff are coders. That is a far better ratio than most NGOs.
It's wonderful that you've been privileged enough to not need to understand the point of "social justice", but it's not a bogeyman preventing you from being a leader.
Apps built in HTML/JS/CSS, straight from 2009.
The feminine vibe doesn't really land, and seems to kind of undermine the rest of what you're trying to say.
There's no shortages of OSS floating around with individuals butting heads about splitting hairs to their preferred interpretation, forking away into oblivion or to a standstill alone.
and while the differences have consequences in the grand scheme of things what mattered is what the trillion dollar corporations wanted, because the FSF didn't manage to do shit, not even the feminine coordination (nor the masculine rallying cry to arms!)
Today, I have access to quality tools on my computer and my computer runs Linux without any of the drama that proprietary equivalents bring and looks visually fantastic. My computer feels mine again and for that, I remain eternally grateful to the FSF.
... it seems to me that Stallman and the FSF got complacent by their relative (and out of my ignorance I'm now assuming that also unexpected) success, and also they completely misunderstood their value proposition, ie. the product, it was not gcc, emacs, or Hurd or whatever, it was the innovation to allow and foster technical public capital accumulation. (and still, it's absolutely a not solved problem to this day. the wheel is reinvented too fucking many times, even in software.)
... of course they do deserve credit, gratitude and a lot of respect and support for their integrity and steadfastness!
This is an exceptionally poor argument.
1. Coders are biased and often not aligned with users whose rights FSF is there to protect. Just look at any OSS vs FS discussion on this site to see examples.
2. Your "probably" here is too big of an assumption and of not much consequence. I have a degree in humanities, do not work in IT and have contributed code to Free Software.
3. You somehow imply that formal education affects _leadership_ in a _rights_ organization and a technical one would be preferable. That's a long shot.
Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following, you're providing a counterexample.
Programmers understand software ecosystems, of which free software is just a subset. I also see a lot of programmers advocating leaderships and other non-technical skills generally. If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
> Good initiatives require strong argumentative basis to have a strong wide following
The FSF has circular logic all throughout their ideology. They only want to argue if you let them frame the conversation with their own conclusions along with a full deconstruction of views they didn't come up with, like open source, which they explicitly work to discredit and do not represent. It is little wonder that their following is not wide nor strong because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity. They are eclipsed by the EFF and several other organizations built around open source applications in terms of fund raising at this point. Don't listen to me. Just go look at some financials. You'll see how little they represent these days.
Some do, some don't and happily (or begrudgingly but willingly) contribute to building a hostile larger ecosystem.
> …of which free software is just a subset.
We're mostly talking about the movement here, but OK. Don't see what's your point here.
> If you observe a pattern where a lot of coders seem biased, maybe there's something else going on?
Of course, self-interest. Mostly the need to minimize work/pay and improve hiring or promotional perspectives.
> ...because they are divisive and completely incapable of working with others or incorporating ideological diversity
That's a great argument as it applies equally to uncommunicative, autocratic, self-absorbed, deceptive entities as well as to principled, unswayed and self-consistent ones.
I'm not arguing FSF is a pinnacle of leadership, au contraire.
This isn't a dig, I've known and admired quite a few people who were absolute geniuses at hardware and/OR software, real engineers but they couldn't even manage a group lunch. It's just an entirely different skillset.
Let me frame it another way:
Software is like soccer, big tech is the FIFA, free software is you amateur football team.
- The FIFA will always tell you they love amateur soccer.
- The FIFA can be run by MBA, manager but your local group of friend/team cannot.
- Someone (probably the FIFA) is telling you your local team need the manager types for you to play soccer with others.
- If an overweight man who never played soccer come to invite you to play soccer in the weekend for free you might not go. If Pele come you will go.
- If an overweight man who never played soccer offer you a job at FIFA you will probably accept because you love soccer and for the money.
- The FIFA is more interested in people watching TV and ads on Sunday than people playing soccer outside. Ultimately they want you to love soccer but it need to be their way. And their way is watching TV and buying their jersey.
This is probably why Theo de Raadt might be a big A-Hole and said no to the FIFA but he is a good player and still have a fit team having fun outside every Sunday.
I wouldn't have bet on this outcome 20 years ago.
All those open source now corrupted foundations with the beautiful websites and the big titles and leadership pages pretend to be something they are not.
In this instance John Gilmore is funding the work. He's not doing it himself.
I work for a company that makes a very popular open source product. The users lead our development, not the coders. Hell, I don't even code, and I get to tell the engineers what to fix based on what our users complain about.
I suppose if you think of free software as a bunch of solo-coded GitHub projects, it can feel like the coders are king, but you absolutely don't maintain a project like Linux, or any of the major distros thereof, by giving coders supreme authority over decision-making...
Those who are in the wider use have been started and kept people like RMS. There are hundreds of them in dustbin or with minimal use.
Focus on outcomes: mainline kernels, modem firmware, reproducible builds, verified boot, power management, app ecosystems, and sustained funding. Credit the projects pushing those fronts and press FSF to support them: attack decisions, not résumés or gender.
> It is very feminine and obviously doesn't work that well.
> Librephone will serve existing developers and projects who aim to build a fully functioning and free (as in freedom) Android-compatible OS.
Please don't do that on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
What are these "huge problems" caused by Pixel devices?
Isn't it only the device tree, and therefore only affecting initial support for the Pixel 10?
Doesn't feel like a huge problem, though it makes it harder to support the Pixel 10.
You can buy a new pixel, install GrapheneOS, and laugh thinking about how you're denying the enemy the OS level tracking they wanted with that device.
When you buy a used phone, it's already been bought by someone. The profit is already in Google's hands. Loads of old phones are in drawers somewhere. Once Graphene is on it, it's faster, not bloated, and you don't need Google anything.
If a major manufacturer released a good smartphone that GrapheneOS could support, they would get new users from the set of people who want GrapheneOS. I would gladly buy a non-Pixel as long as it can run GrapheneOS.
Which means that in a way, if you buy a Pixel and install GrapheneOS, you give more credibility to GrapheneOS, making it more interesting for a different manufacturer to consider supporting them.
eBPF was introduced with Kernel 4.14 officially (but partly long before that). Most LineageOS supported devices still rely on older kernels, the most range being around the Kernel 4.4 or 4.9 branches, which lack that eBPF functionality. The LineageOS maintainers were backporting a lot of things already, but that's the "hardcut of now unsupported legacy devices" that people are experiencing with their old phones.
The issue here is that upstream vendors (e.g. Fairphone, actually meaning upstream Qualcomm IoT) only maintain their outdated kernel versions, and never maintain them in the sense of updating their driver code into newer kernel releases. The drivers are always stuck in an outdated state of a feature frozen kernel.
I'm just making this specific example with the Fairphone because "5 to 8 years support" isn't what most people would think it is. It means "only the really critical security patches of old stuff gets backported" and does not mean "hey we migrated our old code to a new kernel and Android version".
For example, Fairphone 1, 2, 3, 3+ are all stuck in old kernels right now (4.9 being the latest backport for the FP3+) and are essentially not updatable because of this.
I don't try to blame Fairphone here, because other manufacturers are much much worse in this regard. Fairphone and Pixel are already the "as good as it can get" for third-party ROMs case.
I mentioned postmarketOS specifically, because they're trying to fix that by upstreaming the kernel drivers, so that Linux support of those devices will stay updated with newer kernel releases (hopefully).
[1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/bpf
Just an aside, but this is one of the major downsides of monolithic kernels, and a case where microkernels would have had more consumer friendly upsides.
Because in FOSS world every single actor is a snowflake with unique vision. Any form of cooperation ends up in drama and moral accusations.
For example, there should only ever be one clipboard by default. If power users want multiple, they can go out of their way to configure their device config as such. Similarly, the function keys should function as function keys on a keyboard out of the box, without us having to fiddle with config files. Also the scroll wheel click to scroll should work out of the box without requiring editing config files. The default experience is still pretty poor.
But as soon as FOSS orgs will obtain resources comparable to those of car companies I will stop complaining.
What's missing is building something that resonates with the user/consumer's experience backwards, not just personal preferences or interpretations, which is fine, but at that point it's a personal project, not a product, or much larger unless it really captivates both people who can contribute to creating it and also it is adopted quite easily.
Creating beginners can seem like something too many OSS projects can be allergic to. It's the greatest sin of too many projects, and they ultimately can't be freed of it.
Of course no one can be forced to do so, but that's the problem - FOSS crowd would have to actually forced to cooperate, because otherwise petty dramas sabotage any common effort.
So if you tell them it's evil to fork you're saying, in effect, stop working.
I have lots of new functions for GNU make but the chance of getting them into make is almost 0 because the maintainer doesn't like this or that aspect of anything. Fortunately, I can make a fork. If people eventually show a desire to use my fork (nobody, unfortunately!) then he might eventually change his mind or develop some competing feature to kill mine off.
That's what is happening. To get people to pull together, they have to have a reason, like money.
But that's how a lot of projects do: Apache for instance, nginx, or llvm.
The problem is not being OSS, it is the lack of focus, and a game where everybody brings their ball and are playing the way they want instead of an unified game
Why does nginx exist? They could simply have found that config bug in Apache that made Apache slower and we wouldn't have needed another web server...?
Every project should have some competition, in the same way there are several commercial DBs available
At the same time we have several linux distros that suck in different ways
Ubuntu went down the weird GUI route but Linux Mint is OK - it's just nearly as complicated as Fedora.
Now I'm using Artix. The install was a bit old school but that's a one off effort. It's a rolling distribution so I almost never need to build dependencies to get something from git to work. There's never a "big upgrade". No selinux. The packaging system is extremely easy to use so I can often install the very latest e.g. chromium from git by building it myself and installing the package rather than a messy self-install in /usr/local.
In Artix all packages install with the dev component - no separation between dev and binary. For me this is vastly less hassle.
You can use Arch Linux (Artix is an arch derivative), with systemd if you want but I like Artix with dinit - it has all the ease of use of systemd but with an architecture that I prefer.
It's probable that none of this appeals to you, but I just wanted to point out that in an odd way I tumbled through lots of distros (including ones that I haven't mentioned) and found a little heavenly one that I love using every day because it suits my personality - perhaps you will too.
Even the FSF themselves didn't mention it or provided any reasoning for choosing a Google-controlled operating system - despite recommending Librem 5 earlier [1]. What am I missing?
No bad feelings, fsflover, keep up the good work. I also can’t wait to post on here from a libre phone.
i'm still pretty tempted to play with one.
How new do you think the chosen Android hardware will be at the end of the promised reverse-engineering efforts?
See also: https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
It's fast enough and stable enough to serve me (and many other people, including in the HN comments) as a daily driver.
> bad customer service experiences
This depends: Purism is a quite small company, and sometimes they take time to reply, but the community at forums.puri.sm has been really helpful. I'm a happy user.
Librephone appears to be taking existing linux approaches, and specifically reverse engineering the SoC blobs to be completely free. I may have mis read, but it doesn't appear they are building another android distro for android phones, as they already have done that in the past.
Just tried to learn the difference between these and it seems like:
- Graphene - For current devices only - An alternative for phones that are supported and updated by Google. Security Patches, etc.
- LineageOS - For devices while they're supported or may not be updated that often. Support can be sometime by community members.
- PostmarketOS - devices that no longer have a maintained Android version for it, can just become a linux computer. Mobile functionality doesn't necessarily.
Some phone chips overtime end up having a hardware security flaw that software can't fix.
I really enjoy using Android. Part of the issue is not all deices get timely security updates, even if they get monthly updates, the updates might be from 6 months ago. Google might release a security patch but sometimes it has to go through the device manufacturer, and maybe even the mobile company. Pixel / Android pure installs seem to improve this a bit, but it's hard to have complete trust.
It's mainly a libre purity project. A Lineage user won't be able to tell a thing, but the system will be "ethically pure"
Any OS "is able" to use anything from any other OS - in theory and given infinite resources. In practice though, it makes a huge difference when something works by default.
Or they sue anyways hoping for a favorable ruling that changes the interpretation of the law (Oracle v. Google for a famous example of this)
>extracting/copying a firmware blob is not clean-room design
It's stage 1. Clean-room reverse engineering is about working with the nature of copyright, and classically goes roughly like this:
1. You set things up with a "contaminated" or "dirty" side team who have direct exposure to the IP in question, and a "clean" (or "virgin" is another older term) side team that are thoroughly firewalled. The clean side must only have devs who have never ever had any exposure to whatever it is you're trying to clean replicate [0].
2. The dirty side is in charge of producing a "fact sheet"/spec. That side absolutely extracts/disassembles or whatever else to get at the target, which is precisely what "contaminates" them. They are looking at copyrighted code. Then they use that research to a create a purely factual spec, which is then passed across the firewall to the clean side. This must be the only communication.
3. The clean side then uses that to write new code themselves that will handle state per the factual spec they've been given.
The reason it works is that (in the US) purely factual information cannot be copyrighted, there's no "sweat of the brow" doctrine or the like. Copyright, unlike patents, does not cover ideas or methods, it's about the creativity of the person in question. You can't copyright the mathematics of a function, of "when X input is received Y is output", or of general concepts. So if two (or more) people independently create works that happen to cover the exact same subject matter, but can prove they were fully independent, then it doesn't matter even if it happened to be literally identical (however improbable that would be). Each would have their own independent copyright on it.
So clean-room RE avoids all the legal snarls around "how close is this" in favor of the simple binary question of "did the team that wrote this RE'd code have any exposure whatsoever to copyrighted IP?" If the answer to that is "no" that's the end of any legal complaint, because by definition their output cannot be a derivative work. Software patents short circuit that, part of the many reasons they're evil, but as a practical matter the number of really fundamental hard to avoid ones is rapidly shrinking because it's 2025 and by 2005 a lot of the foundations had long since been done.
----
0: Which is not necessarily trivial to hire for, because the kind of person who has the kind of skills you need also is going to tend to enjoy hacking around and reverse engineering stuff for fun anyway increasing the chance they've managed to contaminate themselves.
But the binary blobs are protected by copyright, so you need a license to use them.
https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/drivers/ram/roc...
/e/OS already partners with Fairphone, if you like that hardware: https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairpho...
I agree that PostmarketOS needs a lot more love, but it's very far from being a daily driver system today.
/e/ rolls back privacy and security far more than LineageOS and /e/ includes their own invasive services. Murena services even send data to OpenAI without user consent.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24134-devices-lacking-stand... is a detailed post covering the lack of privacy and security of /e/ with a bunch of linked sources including other detailed posts by third party privacy and security researchers. It also touches on the lack of security of Fairphone hardware including end-of-life Linux kernel branches not getting LTS updates and delays for driver/firmware patches, but it's much worse with /e/.
I recognize that GrapheneOS has a different threat model in mind (journalists, activists, etc.), but /e/OS is a big improvement over OEM Android for most regular people. I tend to agree with your linked article that for users happy to live in Apple's locked-down glass box, iOS is a more secure, more usable system than either Graphene or /e/OS.
/e/ claiming a voice-to-text service is private while it actually sends the audio data to OpenAI is not the approach of a privacy project. Falsely claiming the data sent to OpenAI is anonymized when it's brought up makes it worse. That's one representative example.
I didn't mention GrapheneOS in my reply above, but it's not aimed at a niche audience or specifically for people who need advanced protections as your claiming. It provides much broader app compatibility, stability and usability than /e/ despite their inaccurate claims about it. GrapheneOS is a privacy project providing both privacy protections and also security protections to avoid exploits compromising privacy. iOS is certainly far more private and secure than /e/. It's definitely less secure than GrapheneOS against remote attacks on browsers, messaging apps, etc. iOS having a more secure kernel than the current status quo of hardened Linux doesn't mean it's more secure overall.
Your idea of a super-secure phone is a modern kernel with all the security patches running trusted, official signed Google Play spyware in a sandbox and all the apps collecting personal data in the same sandbox. There's an XKCD meme about this: https://xkcd.com/1200/ You are worrying about the printer drivers.
Taking advantage of privacy flaws in older versions of software is the norm and not treated as malware by most platforms, app stores, news sites or the public at large. Many widely used apps abuse privacy flaws in older Android versions. That happens both in the form of privacy bugs which were fixed in newer versions and weaknesses in the design addressed by newer OS versions. Only privacy patches for issues considered bugs which are assigned a High or Critical severity are backported. The severity is very subjective and they try to avoid adding a large number of backported patches since some OEMs struggle to keep up with it and adding more patches would make it harder. As an example, VPN leaks are only considered Low or Moderate severity issues by Android and don't get backported. Many other kinds of privacy issues are similarly only fixed for the latest OS releases. As another example, many important privacy improvements are not considered bug fixes at all and aren't candidates for being backported regardless of importance. Many privacy improvements require changing the APIs used by apps with new target API levels which can't be backported without breaking compatibility.
A large portion of the missing patches in /e/ we're referring to are privacy patches, not security patches. However, security patches are also needed to protect privacy. Many apps and services abuse the privacy vulnerabilities. The patches being referred to are a mix of both. A large subset are privacy patches, especially the Moderate and Low severity patches due to how they assign severity. Only certain particularly awful classes of privacy vulnerabilities can get considered High or Critical severity to be candidates for Android's backporting to older releases.
Apps exploiting security vulnerabilities to get code execution would be considered malware and is rare, but apps abusing many privacy flaws in older Android is the norm among mainstream apps. You're wrongly interpreting the regular stream of patches for vulnerabilities as only being for security issues when many are for privacy issues. With /e/, you aren't getting the bare minimum to protect privacy and security. Privacy also depends on security and is not an entirely separate thing as you're portraying it. We're not conflating them but rather they're very closely related. You're also disregarding privacy vulnerabilities and the steadily improving standard Android privacy protections.
- Fundamentalists never hijacked the FSF, they founded it: Stallman is about as fundamentalist as possible about free software.
- In the case of the FSF, the fundamentalists are absolutely walking the walk, both in terms of contributing software, and in terms of going out of their way to not use proprietary software.
Performative and an example of very self-defeating tactics that belie motivations other than actually accomplishing anything.
> they founded it
This is true, but it actually contributes to arguments that the FSF is full of crazies content to preach from the monastery of ascetic suffering rather than live in a world with lots of independence and strong open source.
The project is about opening up the closed blobs that mobile chipsets use:
"This project's goal is not another Android distribution, but a long-term project to better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by virtually all SoCs made today."
There's little point in "partnering" with postmarketOS, because the project is literally about clean room reversing the proprietary blobs found in android devices: https://librephone.fsf.org/site/ - there are no commercial phones using postmarketOS with blobs to reverse engineer.
This is false: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Purism_Librem5_(purism-li...
See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589096
You can install postmarketOS on it (just as you can install lineageOS, etc on a Samsung galaxy, etc), but it ships with PureOS. "The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS" - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
The project is to reverse engineer proprietary blobs - so it makes sense to go where those blobs are and reverse to match the functionality that is exposed commercially instead of guessing at a subset for base implementation on a non-official OS?
> See also my other comment
It seems you are just as confused about this project as the OP, which is ironic given your name.
Why does it matter? Yes, I would prefer that FSF collaborated with PureOS directly, but collaborating with postmarketOS also seems possible. There are enough blobs in Librem 5, which don't depend on the OS.
> which is ironic given your name
Indeed I'm quite surprised about the FSF actions lately.
Because to reverse it you need to have a functionally complete baseline to compare it to. For the Librem that baseline is what it ships with (PureOS). For nearly every other device on the planet, that is Android.
By them focusing on creating fully functional free drivers to swap out with the non-free driver blobs on Android, they will have created a reference source that can be adapted for any other OS.
But sure, librem5 probably has most of that already.
So it would be less work and would benefit more operating systems to work on it. Yet the FSF chose another hardware - I don't understand why.
How can you reverse engineer firmware without focusing on a specific piece of hardware? Firmware is tied to hardware, isn't it?
I realized that there will never be a vendor that actually open sources their firmware blobs. We need better legislation or a complete rewrite of our judicative system to fix this, which realistically is never going to happen.
It's an anti-model in their business world, given how contracts and licensing works from upstream ARM or NXP or MediaTek. It doesn't matter really where the vendor sources their chips from. They all have similar NDAs and contracts and royalty fees.
That's why I was so disappointed by my Librem phone, again, because they, again, promised that the NXP related firmware blobs were open sourced, which honestly was a very overpriced lie to begin with in comparison to the Pinephone devices that were sold at self-cost.
I have no idea how the FSF could recommend Librem devices, because they are literally just as free as every next door Qualcomm or Snapdragon chipset.
Why partner with Fairphone and Pine64? They already have open hardware, and require zero reverse engineering to get a fully open solution working. In a world with thousands of Fairphones and Pinephones, and billions of corporate smartphones, replacing the proprietary software needed to run those billions of corporate smartphones is a hell of a win for software freedom.
And are you really expecting the argument "open source loses" to be a real argument against a project by the Free Software Foundation? This is like asking a cancer charity why they don't endorse your preferred brand of cigarettes.
What the FSF is doing here isn't about maximizing your experience with your preferred custom ROM, it is about tearing down the proprietary software barriers that prevent the vast majority of smartphone users from fully owning the hardware they purchased. It fits perfectly with the FSF's goals.
Once we live in a centrally planned utopia these projects will all be merged with each other and produce the perfect phone/operating system/smart watch.
Are you aware that all those millions of devices require each model a dedicated reverse-engineering effort? You don't gain the coverage you're implying by concentrating on Android at all.
There's tons of evidence of this with stuff like linux distros, desktop environments (each one MUST have its own sanctioned file manager, video player, music player etc, god forbid some godless charlatan come along and make its own).
The price of admission into these 'tribes' is the adoption of the local creed (libraries/HIG/coding style/whatever/not speaking out against the Dear Leader/Core Principles/local purity committee). As with other such despotic organizations, incompetence and laziness is tolerated, disloyalty is not.
"Open source" didn't loose because it didn't fight anything. It was exactly "Open source" that enabled Google to dominate the smartphone landscape.
FSF and many other have been warning us for decades that Android been open source didn't matter because firmware, play store and many other components of Android were proprietary.
People gave a shit to them and now do you want to blame them for the results?
The diversity of projects were not and are not the problem. The problem is people that do nothing and only criticize.
The financial interest may have preferred a licensing model, but either way, it was the financial interest that actually built a ton of this software. Linux isn't unpopular with businesses because of its license model. It is healthy because it found ways to plug into financial interest.
The FSF will always push licensing models while ignoring financial interest, basically abandoning users and businesses. There are how many billion smartphone users on Earth, and the FSF expects volunteer programmers and volunteer donations recruited on one of the worst websites I have ever seen to carry the load? Give me a break.
The FSF will argue "you can totally sell Free Software"[1], which ignores the fact that without any restrictions on distribution/copying, the fair market value of said Free Software rapidly drops to ~$0. It's not a viable business model. Companies have built alternate business models around soliciting donations, or selling support or non-free add-ons to Free software, but selling Free Software itself (at least as the FSF defines it) doesn't actually work in practice. (You can do it obviously, but it's effectively just a different way of soliciting donations at that point; the fair market value of the software is ~$0.)
> You can do it obviously, but it's effectively just a different way of soliciting donations at that point; the fair market value of the software is ~$0
It is a viable business model. At XWiki SAS¹, they do this for their "Pro apps" [1] which are paid extensions for XWiki targeted to businesses and that are free software (under the LGPLv2 license) with license checks.
Business they won't bother removing the license checks, it's easy enough to pay, and far easier than donating.
It is not XWiki SAS's only business strategy nor the one that brings the most money, but still, that's not a possibility to discard too fast.
You can also find paid open source Android apps on the Play store, and people (individuals!) will totally pay for them even if you can have them for free from F-Droid, like OsmAnd+ [2] or Conversations [3].
¹ I work for them
I'm not saying it's impossible to survive with that model; lots of organization survive on donations. But you're not gonna be able to build the Free Software equivalent of Microsoft or Google on donations.
That said, I think doing that with business software is a particularly interesting case because it allows low level employees to justify running a donation through the regular software purchasing process without raising too many eyebrows if they care to. I've seen a few other projects with similar models.
That's almost like saying that Netflix relies on the consumers' goodwill, since pirating is too easy. In reality, people pay for convenience in getting what they want.
In XWiki's case, we know it's not perceived like "I could be having it for free but I'll pay anyway because it's a nice thing to do".
We do explain that our stuff is open source to our customers though. It's a selling point.
In our case, admittedly, it helps that our target customers want our support anyway.
> before someone just undercuts you with a fork.
Absolutely, it is a risk to take into consideration. Now, maintaining a fork has costs too, and someone doing this would rely on continued maintenance and goodwill from the upstream vendor as well.
Downstream vendors actually have an incentive to keep good relationships with upstream, so they can share fixes and have some guarantee that whatever they base their business on keeps being maintained.
I think there is an issue with your definition of "user freedom". What do you mean by it?
Stallman, when defining free software, does not bother with standards or terms: he relies on his own definition of what "user freedom" means and from there states that free software is software that is not restrictive of this freedom.
Free software simply does not restrict what the user can do with a program. It is not a matter of interest. People that choose a free license when they publish something (and respect the license's terms, obviously) are voluntarily letting go of their ability to restrict the user's usage of the program.
The issue I would have with "non-predatory" or "non-abusive" non-free software is that it does not allow me to fix problems I might have with the program. But this is only a problem I have. In other contexts, maybe a user needs to send (modified or otherwise) copies to other people of the software without being able to make sure the author agrees that this transaction is ok.
Fundamentally, non-free software restricts the user's freedom, even if it fully respects what the user would want to do. Similarly, a typewriter that can only output English text would restrict your freedom to type anything beyond English text (which is not something you would care about if you only wanted to write English).
That's the idea anyway. What do you think?
Stallman goes further than my preferred definition, insisting that Free Software must also be freely redistributable with no required payment. This cripples that very same market for patches by greatly limiting the resources available to fund it, and cripples the software itself if there's no big commercial interest backing it. The result is that Free Software is often not competitive with proprietary software, except when it does have a big commercial backer (Chromium, AOSP, etc) in which case that developer is often able to maintain a virtual monopoly on patches despite it theoretically being open to competition.
What do you mean? What would free software requiring redistribution payment look like? Say I send a copy of a free-as-in-freedom game that I may or may not have modified in some way to a friend or on a forum, should I pay its author(s) for this? How could I, for instance, commission someone to modify software if I want to change it when I don't have the skills to do so myself, in your definition of free software? I think a simpler definition, like Stallman's, is less restrictive of software modification.
Restricting how software is redistributed holds a great deal of power, especially when you remember the idea behind free software is that you get to have control over your software. Copyleft is such an example -- it is highly restrictive.
I get the financial issue one could have with free software as defined by Stallman; freeing the software you distribute is a difficult decision. Free software is advocated from the point of view of its users, who are ignorant to the difficulties one might face when developing and publishing software. If this is a decision you can make, it is kinder to your users to free the software you publish.
Side note: free software requires one to examine how they value commodities. Do you value the object itself, or the human time it took to make it? In a world where software is thought of as free by default, developers can be paid not per copy, but per patch. I believe such a world would be better for software quality because I agree with you that competitive markets are better at aligning with consumer interests than monopolies.
Your friend would have to buy a copy of the original game from the author (or a reseller) before using your modified version of the game. You could even sell your mod to others, but they would also have to own a copy of the original software in order to use it since what you'd be selling is the modification, not the original software it depends on.
This is technically already legal, except most apps don't have the source code available for you to modify in the first place, and some companies try to abuse license terms to prevent it.
> How could I, for instance, commission someone to modify software if I want to change it when I don't have the skills to do so myself, in your definition of free software?
You'd just... do that? Same way you commission a mechanic to rotate the tires on your car. You'd have the source code and build tools. What's the problem exactly?
> Restricting how software is redistributed holds a great deal of power
I agree. I don't think authors of my version of Free Software should have control over how software is distributed except that new licenses have to be purchased from them. Once a license is sold, I don't think the author should have control over how that license is used or who it gets transferred to (except perhaps a modest limit on how frequently it can be transferred, to prevent shenanigans like third party floating license pools).
> developers can be paid not per copy, but per patch
I don't think this is very practical with Stallman's version of Free Software, because once you sell one copy of a patch that person can just turn around and sell it to others, undercutting you. So you'd have to price your patches at an absurdly high rate to recoup your costs. Effectively you'd be selling a personalized support contract, not actually selling software. This model sort of works in commercial contexts (hi Red Hat), but it's clearly not competitive with the proprietary software model. (Compare the market cap to giants like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc.)
I guess maybe a good analogy would be like trying to port coreboot to a laptop.
I really do not understand this comment at all. I don't understand the weird judgemental tone, and I don't understand that people have reacted to it like there is content there.
I make a parallel with politics and transparency, a software lead once told me that a completely transparent government was tried in the french revolution and it kind of didn't work. For example, we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent. I feel that free software would obsess over that private fraction because for all you know it might hold all of the secrets and evil that you imagine.
That said, it is possible that under the guise of reasonable need for private blobs/three-letter-agencies, a lot of other 'evil' things may be hidden. Maybe they say it's due to security or IP concerns, to provide protection against device tampering, to avoid pollution of radiofrequency spectrums, but it's possible that in reality they are hiding spying software in the wifi firmware and hardware keystores?
I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that are ok to have closed source, then they could be taken seriously, otherwise they will just be ignored and leave room for precisely the kind of misuse of closed source that they fear. This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.
Extremism begets extremism, if the jails are too full (or too empty), advocating for the other extreme will get you nowhere, the Overton Window doesn't quite apply, in fact it can be harmful as you are providing a real threat to the other extreme.
Open source is just pragmatic and is very happy with the 99% being open source. It’s more corporate and doesn’t generally care at all about the dogma.
That is the nature of software. 1% is too much. It is Free or it is not
It rather depends on what that 1% is.
The low-level code is what's most important to be free. If you have free firmware and drivers and operating system but then you still have to run a Windows VM or WINE for an old proprietary app, you can only have problems when running that app.
If you have opaque blobs interacting with the hardware, they can crash the whole system, expose firmware-level security vulnerabilities with persistence and the blobs are specific to a kernel version so when the vendor stops providing updates, you're stuck with an obsolete kernel version with known security vulnerabilities. If anything needs to be free software, it's that.
> This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.
Android is "open source" but then the devices are Tivoized or you run into attestation failures if you actually want to run your own version of it. GitHub literally got bought out by Microsoft. These seem like legitimate concerns.
> we all would agree that there's some functions of government related to war and security that should not be transparent
> I feel that if the FSF recognizes that there's some areas that are ok to have closed source, then they could be taken seriously, otherwise they will just be ignored and leave room for precisely the kind of misuse of closed source that they fear. This is especially noticeable when they fight against projects that precisely do a lot for open source, like github (See GitLab/Savannah), or Android, they are 99% of the way there, give them a break.
Does it still count as a cult if they're right? Do they still count as extremists if they're empirically correct? Maybe it's a good thing to have that type of extremist out there, fighting for everybody.
It's not that FSF is proven correct, it's that the FSF disapproves of 99.9% of software, it's easy for them to look back when there's a scandal and say "see? we told you so.". Too many false positives.
Yeah I don't know that this premise is true. For a lot of examples you might
give WRT war or security, I feel like some will take the approach that "if
you can't do it transparently then you probably shouldn't be doing it at
all".
You could perhaps say "Well then you shouldn't get in a war". But that isn't really under your control. If someone else decides they are in a war with you. You are in a war. It doesn't really matter whether you wanted to be in one or not.
Yes, that's what it means to have ideals.
Some criticisms might be genuine — and even valid — but a lot of times they have the same smell as organized smear campaigns (such as documented in [0]).
Why do we have to have /e/OS instead of a better supported LineageOS, because /e/ is a 1:1 copy anyways?
Why do we have to have a Librephone project now instead of partnering with say, Fairphone and the Pine64 people?
Open source loses this war because proprietary devices are streamlined. The only thing that comes close to this is GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and postmarketOS.
LineageOS has huge problems since the mandatory eBPF requirements of late Android versions, which postmarketOS and its upstreamed kernel drivers could fix. GrapheneOS has huge problems because of Pixel devices, which LineageOS could help with.
We need a unification of this ecosystem because each on their own is hardly surviving on their own against the megacorporations.