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.
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."