FSF turns forty with a groundbreaking new project and a new president(fsf.org)
100 points by Y_Y 2 days ago | 25 comments
- vintagedave 2 days agoThe new project is 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 1980.
I found very little info about it online. There is this github org:
which mirrors PostMarketOS: https://github.com/LibrePhone/pmOS, 'The Linux distribution for mobile devices and beyond…'
[-]- microtonal 2 days agoI found very little info about it online. There is this github org:
Probably not related, it's unlikely that the FSF would host anything on GitHub.
- duskwuff 2 days agoThe fact that the FSF doesn't even seem to have a web page on their own site describing LibrePhone leaves me with little expectation that this project will succeed. I can't find anything on Savoye's site or socials either.
- ChickeNES 2 days ago> a developer who has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since the 1980
Can they really not find ANYONE outside their bubble? A phone lives and dies by its UI and they pick someone who primarily does toolchain/CLI work? I don't get it.
[-]- disjunct 23 hours agoBased on the livestream, the project is for Rob to find the freest Android ROM and phone and then reverse engineer the proprietary bits to the FSF's standards. Not very well communicated, but he seems qualified to do that.
- klooney 2 days ago"should they just donate to postmarketos" is the sort of obvious followup
- unsnap_biceps 2 days agoWhat happened to the last attempt?[-]
- duskwuff 2 days agoLooks like:
1) Too few developers to keep up with new Android releases, or with devices becoming obsolete over time. They got stalled trying to update to Android 11 (2020) and never finished.
2) Refusing to support newer devices that doesn't meet their demands (e.g. must have a removable battery). Turns out, the market doesn't respond to the demands of a small open-source project.
[-]- M95D 2 days agoI don't understand the need to be all the time updated with the bleeding edge upstream when there aren't enough devs/contributors. Every underfunded understaffed project fails the same way: tying to keep up.
Just skip a version. The world won't end.
[-]- duskwuff 2 days agoThey already did that. The previous release was based on Android 6, and is functionally useless nowadays given that it only runs on a couple of Samsung devices all released around 2011-12.
If you're trying to maintain a fork of a large open-source project, and especially one which needs to interoperate with external systems like Android, keeping up with upstream releases is not optional. The upstream will move on without you.
- kouteiheika 2 days agoI briefly looked but either I'm blind or it doesn't exist - is there a video of the event anywhere? I'd love to watch the talks.
Side note - if FSF wants its message to reach a wider audience and get more people to care about free software it should really get out of its own bubble. Why wasn't this streamed and archived on YouTube? Yes, this is a rhetoric question - I know perfectly why. My point here is - and let me make a colorful analogy:
If you're, say, a Scientology missionary, what the hell is the point of preaching inside of your own church, to people who are already Scientologists? If you want to be an effective missionary you go out where the non-believers are, and you don't immediately tell people about Xenu, the planetary ruler from 70 million years ago, or else they'll immediately dismiss you and think you're batshit crazy. You ease them in step-by-step.
FSF puts ideological purity as an absolute number one (e.g. recommend Trisquel GNU/Linux, which is pretty much unusable on most machines for normal people), and they refuse to spread the message on platforms where non-free-software people are (e.g. YouTube), and then we're all surprised that the free software movement is dying, and non-copyleft licenses are dominating (although, yes, there are other reasons for that too).
[-]- onionisafruit 2 days ago> you don't immediately tell people about Xenu, the planetary ruler from 70 million years ago
What is fsf’s equivalent of Xenu that they shouldn’t tell you about up front? I want to say you should need to be at least level 3 at fsf before learning about rms.
- ebiester 2 days agoThey could as easily put the video on some of the OSS solutions as that. Or they could self host. They do not value effective advocacy for their ideas.
I do not see the FSF as an effective organization today.
- Y_Y 2 days agoIt's important to spread the word to those who haven't yet hurd the good gnus.[-]
- DemocracyFTW2 18 hours agoay ay, herd the gnus!
- bjourne 2 days agoDamned if you do - damned if you don't. It's the dilemma all counter-culturists struggle with. Greta Thunberg famously sail to climate conferences: "She is an ideological purist! She don't convince everyday people!" If she had flown instead: "She is such a hypocrite! She doesn't live what she preaches!"
- DonHopkins 2 days agoJust be grateful South Park hasn't done an episode about the FSF and RMS (yet)!
- AnthonyMouse 2 days agoIsn't the main problem with phones the lack of real "free software" drivers and firmware? Are they finally going to wrangle that one?[-]
- a96 2 days agoThe lack of any chipset that would have tolerable information for producing those or any lifetime or willingness to deal with someone smaller than a Sony or LG. But yeah, drivers is close to where that ends up breaking.[-]
- AnthonyMouse 9 hours agoThe thing I don't really understand is why no one is doing this. Fine, Qualcomm sucks, but why is there no phone SoC from SiFive?
The TDP of a lot of existing phone chips (e.g. various Snapdragons) is often 10-15W. Ryzen 7 5800U and various others are configurable down to those numbers. Why has no one ever put one in a phone or in a tablet with a cell modem?
Where is Dell or Framework or any of these young companies from China that want to take a dent out of Samsung? Where, for that matter, is Samsung?
Trolls come out to say there is no demand for it, but do the math. Having open source drivers doesn't make your chip less attractive to the people who don't care about that, so if you design the chip you still get all of those sales and the ones from the people who do care. Meanwhile the other incumbents are hidebound and myopic, so if your hardware creates a software ecosystem that depends on it, you'll have it to yourself for a decent while before the recognition that you're getting 100% of those sales because you're the only one providing the hardware documentation they need can permeate through the relevant layers of the incumbent's bureaucracy. And by then you've reinvested that revenue into making a better chip than them.
First mover advantage is valuable.
- M95D 2 days agoWhich is why phone projects should start with new hardware.[-]
- sidewndr46 2 days agowouldn't that mean they would be starting with new hardware that doesn't exist? So they'd have to make their own?[-]
- trinsic2 2 days agoMaybe Framework might one day be able to support the market with new hardware. We need an open hardware consortium to promote software freedom. If we don't have an open hardware environment that is a foundation for free software, we are fighting a losing battle.
- M95D 1 day agoYes, that's exactly it.
- aftergibson 2 days agoThat seems ambitious for the FSF.
I would love whatever they put forward to succeed, but I have to guess this is them aligning an endorsement/marketing around a current project such as PostmarketOS
- eps 2 days ago[flagged]