The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced its project to bring mobile phone freedom to users. “Librephone” is an initiative to reverse-engineer obstacles preventing mobile phone freedom until its goal is achieved.

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.

  • iopq@lemmy.world
    19·
    2 days ago

    So they could do it for pixels and this open source firmware could be used by Graphene OS, for example?

    • TMP_NKcYUEoM7kXg4qYe@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 days ago

      The issue is that for the FSF, what they call “software freedom” is their number one goal. So what’s likely to happen is that they create some kind of “deblobbed” firmware that breaks many features and security of the device, which Graphene OS will refuse to use.

      I hope this project will be useful but am worried that they’ll just make a shittier version of someone else’s work like they did with e.g. Libreboot.

      • ExtremeUnicorn@feddit.org
        3·
        14 hours ago

        There’s a bit of hyperbolism and distortion in that comment.

        So first of all, the FSF did not create Libreboot, that was just a coreboot distribution by one (or two) people and I would not call it shitty, it had prebuilt binaries with working GRUB configs for the models supported, even allowing for full disk encryption with a well written guide on how to do so.

        Secondly, it’s hard to create a chain of trust without trusing the hardware. As long as the manufacturer remains in control of any part of it, you will get the same situation thay we have now. I would rather use a deblobbed device than wait for obscure security features that provide no real-world benefit to my use case.

        However, I think this may not catch on. Hundreds of millions of people use completely outdated phones with spyware of some form on them right now, they simply don’t care.