Comment by rtpg
9 months ago
Was there ever? And is the situation improving or worsening?
I am alright with things that allow for improvement, at least in theory
9 months ago
Was there ever? And is the situation improving or worsening?
I am alright with things that allow for improvement, at least in theory
Anyways, we as informed consumers are hopefully all agreeing on striving for an open mobile OS and open hardware. For those of us, who consider themselves democratic, that is even an imperative.
Not sure what the situation is with Librem, Pine and Joola/SailfishOS, maybe those qualify?
The Librem 5 and Pinephone are closed source hardware with closed source firmware. It's a misconception that they're open source. They have open source drivers, not hardware and firmware.
SailfishOS is not open source itself. It's far less open source than Android which has the Android Open Source Project with the whole base OS.
AOSP is coming to an end...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44254540
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Open source drivers is a big step forward we must not discount, creating a separation between hardware trust and OS trust.
That said, to your point, both are misrepresented as fully open frequently which is just not true, and obscures efforts by teams that are working on fully open hardware solutions the hard way.
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Purism uses U-Boot on the Librem5 and modified coreboot (in other places) I believe.
https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/purism/librem5.html
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I tried librem and pine a year or so ago. As long as it is basic phone use ( phone, text ), it is ok for daily use. That said, the experience is nowhere near ok experience in terms of speed or responsiveness, when compared to most basic android phones. I do not know if that changed since, but librem left a bad taste in my mouth based on how they seem to operate. Pine, by comparison, was a lot more honest about its limitations.
Replicant was the last time we had fully open Android devices. We have regressed.
All of those were closed source hardware with tons of closed source firmware. Not shipping firmware updates doesn't mean the firmware doesn't exist. There aren't open source devices in general. It's not specific to smartphones.
The entire point of Replicant was replacing all mutable closed software, firmware, and blobs with open alternatives and they did to a large degree succeed at that isolated goal.
Sadly this was, to your usual points, at the major expense of security making those devices purely research projects at best and not something anyone should ever actually use.
When you are stuck on a platform that requires closed firmware you are kind of stuck blindly accepting updates from the vendor to patch security bugs, stuck hoping they are not actually introducing new backdoors.
This is why I reject platforms that require closed firmware in the first place to the fullest extent I can.
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