Comment by ninjagoo
3 days ago
It is way past time to build a 'people's phone', funding it through a platform like LiberaPay [1][2] or Open Collective [3][4], with a requirement for the device to be completely open-source.
[1] https://liberapay.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberapay [3] https://opencollective.com/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Collective
If we start today, we could have a new phone in 2-3 years. Future generations will thank us.
It's not just phones. There is a concerted movement by massively-moneyed folks to destroy the fabric of open society, so there are a number of different areas that need attention. A coordinated effort across the breadth of society to restore, maintain or improve the foundations of open society.
I think you are 2-4 orders of magnitude off if you think donation could be enough for a project as important as Android where 1 day delay in fixing security issue is just disasterous.
> where 1 day delay in fixing security issue is just disasterous.
looking at the current reality of patches is that you are lucky if there is a patch next month
So we don't even have a 'people's battery' to power up this phone. All these phone pouch batteries are proprietary in design. Go ask Framework for their BMS design details and provide links to it if you think I'm joking
Can you explain what open society means?
> Can you explain what open society means?
An open society is a society where people can freely express ideas, question authority, practice different beliefs, and participate in public life under the protection of laws and individual rights. It is usually marked by free speech, rule of law, pluralism, relatively open debate, and institutions that allow peaceful change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_society
Thank you. Much better info at your link.
Open phones are all fine and well, but good luck convincing banking and government applications to work on those (especially in countries where bank login is used to access government services).
A single manufacturer convinced a lot of them to work with Apple phones.
It's definitely doable, but the product has to be appealing to users, which also seems doable as phones already peaked in capability and making a good phone now is more about polish in build + software than being technologically ahead of the competition.
I consider my 2yo mid-range phone a great phone, and with today's politics owning my phone is in the top-3 things I'd like my next phone to improve on, not a better camera, screen, battery, slimmer build nor gimmicky stuff (ok, maybe an IR to replace remotes or LoRa support would be kind of cool)
In my country, government applications are required to be interoperable, use open APIs and work with open formats (XML, PDF, etc.). There should be no problem there. I've already used some FOSS applications to interact with government services.
Banks are required to interoperate using open API in the EU. EU managed to cripple this requirement, by not requiring open api access to regular customers, but only to accredited organizations. There's more work to be done on this front.
> Open phones are all fine and well, but good luck convincing banking and government applications to work on those (especially in countries where bank login is used to access government services).
First phones, then lobbying. As citizens of an open society, government exists to serve us, not the other way around. With enough users, they will have to respond. As I said, there are a number of areas that need attention and a coordinated effort across the breadth of society to restore, maintain and improve the foundations of an open society.
it also makes it urgent to have a platform with leverage under 3-5 years, with a whole lot of countries pushing for digital ID globally.
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> As citizens of an open society, government exists to serve us, not the other way around.
I really wish this was true. It should be true. It used to be true. But I don't think it is now.
> With enough users, they will have to respond.
Well, yeah. But even if we had millions of people lined up (which we don't) it still wouldn't be enough to force a positive response.
Frankly there's too much money wrapped up in this now. Because of that, open computing will always be under attack. I hate coming off as so defeatist, but what we need is a culture change, and a new device which is (from the perspective of the 99%) worse and more expensive than Android isn't going to get us that.
Carry an old used iPhone, powered off with no SIM, and treat it as a black box hardware token that you turn on only for these uses. You can tether it via wifi through your “real” freedom phone.
Your freedom phone will not be on your carrier's device allowlist.
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there is a power that could help with this. And I know quite a few people do not like this. But this would be prime EU real estate.
convince people to use them and banks can suck it up
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