Comment by fsflover
6 months ago
> there are no commercial phones using postmarketOS with blobs to reverse engineer
This is false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589096
6 months ago
> there are no commercial phones using postmarketOS with blobs to reverse engineer
This is false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45589096
> This is false
You can install postmarketOS on it (just as you can install lineageOS, etc on a Samsung galaxy, etc), but it ships with PureOS. "The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS" - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
The project is to reverse engineer proprietary blobs - so it makes sense to go where those blobs are and reverse to match the functionality that is exposed commercially instead of guessing at a subset for base implementation on a non-official OS?
> See also my other comment
It seems you are just as confused about this project as the OP, which is ironic given your name.
> but it ships with PureOS
Why does it matter? Yes, I would prefer that FSF collaborated with PureOS directly, but collaborating with postmarketOS also seems possible. There are enough blobs in Librem 5, which don't depend on the OS.
> which is ironic given your name
Indeed I'm quite surprised about the FSF actions lately.
> Why does it matter?
Because to reverse it you need to have a functionally complete baseline to compare it to. For the Librem that baseline is what it ships with (PureOS). For nearly every other device on the planet, that is Android.
By them focusing on creating fully functional free drivers to swap out with the non-free driver blobs on Android, they will have created a reference source that can be adapted for any other OS.
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I wanted to mention that back then when Mozilla announced its FirefoxOS based devices with the "ZTE Open" as a developer device, I realized how broken the ecosystem actually is. The ZTE Open wasn't actually open source and you weren't even able to compile FirefoxOS completely, and only the Gaia (UI) parts could be flashed or changed. So much for open source as a branding, it was a pretty useless device in terms of development.
I realized that there will never be a vendor that actually open sources their firmware blobs. We need better legislation or a complete rewrite of our judicative system to fix this, which realistically is never going to happen.
It's an anti-model in their business world, given how contracts and licensing works from upstream ARM or NXP or MediaTek. It doesn't matter really where the vendor sources their chips from. They all have similar NDAs and contracts and royalty fees.
That's why I was so disappointed by my Librem phone, again, because they, again, promised that the NXP related firmware blobs were open sourced, which honestly was a very overpriced lie to begin with in comparison to the Pinephone devices that were sold at self-cost.
I have no idea how the FSF could recommend Librem devices, because they are literally just as free as every next door Qualcomm or Snapdragon chipset.
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