The project, developed in partnership with veteran free software developer Rob Savoye, aims to create a fully free and open mobile platform, from the firmware to the operating system.

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[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 23 points 16 hours ago (5 children)

I'd rather see a stable OS and ecosystem for good, Free apps that we can flash onto existing devices. I'm quite happy with my Fairphone (repairable! modular! ethical!) and we know that building and marketing a device is painfully expensive.

Let's make Debian or Arch just work on most phones instead of trying to compete in a saturated market.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 24 minutes ago

Mobian is Debian designed for phones. PostmarketOS is another project doing the same thing, but with an alpine Linux base.

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

There isn't much concrete information, but my guess is that OS/ecosystem is exactly what this project is, and that they are not talking about physical hardware. Specially considering that they are putting the emphasis on free software (not hardware) and they are involving a software developer. Making a phone's hardware free would be an entirely different beast.

In the afternoon, FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman announced an exciting new project: Librephone.

Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF to bring full computing freedom to mobile computing environments. The LibrePhone Project is a partnership with Rob Savoye, a developer who has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since the 1980s. "Since mobile phone computing is now so ubiquitous, we're very excited about LibrePhone and think it has the potential to bring software freedom to many more users all over the world."

From the official FSF post about the event.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 7 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

How old is your oldest working fairphone? I’ve heard too many bad things about software atrophy to declare it a success yet.

[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I'm using a Fairphone 4, which is 4 years old at this point (October 2021) and I'm still quite happy with it, but I owned the Fairphone 1 and 2 as well.

In terms of software atrophy, they do offer support for your device for 5 years, which is better than most, and because of its open nature, it's generally well supported by alternatives like Lineage or Calyx, but yeah, I'm still on Android 13. While I still get regular security patches and haven't really had a need for an upgrade, there's no denying that the FP4 is behind.

Of course, it's also easily repairable, supports an SD card and replaceable battery, so that's a tradeoff I'm happy with.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Do phone calls and RCS work 100% of the time? (I really hope the answer is “yes” because I really want to get out of the closed source ecosystem.)

[–] danielquinn@lemmy.ca 2 points 7 hours ago

I'm afraid I have no idea what an RCS is, but maybe that's a network/region specific thing? I'm in the UK using GiffGaff (O₂) and the phone, SMS, and data works exactly as well as everyone else's... which is to say perfectly in most places and sporadically on the train due to the dead zones on the route.

[–] kadu@scribe.disroot.org 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Let's make Debian or Arch just work

Wonder why that's extremely rare on ARM devices, especially those with modems, and rarely works beyond proof of concepts on some very specific devices? Its not like you're the first to have this idea.

[–] 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 14 hours ago

Let's make Debian or Arch just work on most phones

You have no idea how any of it works, do you?

Fighting closed source drivers, blobs, configurations, entitled users who want everything to work perfectly is not a child's play. Having control over the whole device like this project is huge.