Comment by gorgoiler
4 months ago
It is very inspiring to see a project announced like this with the developer’s name attached to it. As someone who has always struggled with the confidence to be open about my work, let alone work openly in public, it feels extremely inspiring to see Rob Savoye (and Zoe and John behind him) nail their plans to the door like this.
My thrill is matched in strength by the loathing I have for this Apple device on which I type, whose entire boot process is miserably locked down from the very start. It is like a bicycle made from Mickey Mouse logo bolts where the spanners are proprietary and not for sale. The situation is just as ludicrous.
The two major phone OS companies both stand on the shoulders of IBM PC, openly bootable hardware, and the fantastic software systems nurtured and built on top of these platforms — the BSDs, GNU, Linux, and the long tail of all that run on them. It is very troubling that their own platforms are the antithesis of being openly hackable.
Librephone could be successful in a few ways. Outright, as a device, but also as a carrot to bring open handheld hardware to enough people to drive political change (with a small-p, the politics of society, as well as politics of the big-p kind) such that iOS and Android would have to follow suit. With actual public policy Librephone could also end up being a stick: bringing about legislation that requires computers of any kind to be able to boot software of our choosing. Right-to-repair plus plus, if you will.
With enough Librephone devices in the right hands, either the market or the law will demand that we have the same openness and freedom to use our devices the same way we do commodity x86 hardware today. The same freedom imprisoned and exploited in the core of mine and your phone, right now.
> The two major phone OS companies both stand on the shoulders of IBM PC, openly bootable hardware, and the fantastic software systems nurtured and built on top of these platforms — the BSDs, GNU, Linux, and the long tail of all that run on them. It is very troubling that their own platforms are the antithesis of being openly hackable.
I can kinda see a lineage from the PC to Android, if only by way of Linux being born on the 386. But Apple? They've been doing their own thing since day 1; I can easily imagine a world where IBM never existed and the iPhone is unchanged.
It’s a fine thread, but the links from FreeBSD to Darwin are real, and Darwin is behind macOS and iOS. Not just as a kernel, but a lot of the runtime and many of the auxiliary pieces of software too.
Oh, I agree that Darwin is, especially by way of NeXTSTEP but even independently since then, significantly derived from the BSDs (IIRC mostly FreeBSD, but also a chunk of NetBSD code got used to make it). I just think that that would have happened with or without the PC being around. In some parallel universe without IBM making the PC, the unix family still prospers, probably mostly on the 68000 family instead of x86, Apple does their own thing for a while, and then those lineages converge in Darwin just like in our universe.