We really need a phone for hackers no matter how small the market is. I hope that's Librem this time after Neo, Ubuntu, FirefoxOS.
The only possibility I can imagine is that by leaning into a niche market, embracing low-volume but also the community that goes with it, rather than engaging in a quixotic quest to become a viable competitor to the established duopoly, Librem can become sustainable along the lines of niche laptop manufacturer System76. That doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, and it would be pretty cool.
They should just use briar. It hides metadata, it's encrypted, it's peer to peer. It's biggest downsides are no file transfer, no iOS client, no offline messaging.
Or better yet someone should develop an app based on one of the newer concepts like vuvuzela/alpenhorn or loopix.
You’re right that metadata isn’t protected serverside: so use servers you trust. In future the plan is to move to a hybrid p2p approach to fix this, but usability and features are more important given you can pick the servers to trust. https://matrix.org/~matthew/2016-12-22%20Matrix%20Balancing%... has more details on the tradeoff.
I’d be shocked if your friends and coworkers aren’t accessible via Matrix, given bridges through to Gitter, IRC, Slack etc. And if you want them to be native Matrix users, just invite them :)
In terms of “not decentralised enough”... the only bits which aren’t decentralised are the node which hosts your account, and (currently) the mapping DB of email/msisdn to matrix IDs. The latter is being fixed by the community currently; the former is harder but due to be worked on next year (hopefully solved by the time the Librem5 ships).
In terms of briar: it’s a great project, and perhaps it will surpass Matrix in time. But right now the battery and bandwidth requirements of running a full p2p stack on the client - as well as all the missing features you list, are a showstopper. It’s also not really set up as an open protocol/specification; just a library and app.
So, Matrix is probably the best bet for now. And we’re counting on evolving at the current rate or faster over the next year in the lead up to the Librem5 shipping.
Push notifications via GCM or APN all also centralized, correct?
What do you see as taking the place of GCM or APN on the Librem 5 phone? I currently use Riot on a device with neither (5 minute polling) and the experience as an instant messaging application isn't as good as an Android/iOS device.
If matrix moved toward pond style metadata protection I would make the effort to move my social graph on to it and probably support it financially.
As is, I don't see the value proposition of matrix. I am genuinely curious what it is. An update to xmpp? Is it that it is going to be encrypted AND federated? Many popular apps now support default encryption so that isn't much of a selling point. Conversations is federated and is not getting traction the way signal has. Being federated has benefits but they are sort of theoretical and aren't high on most people's list of concerns. Further the value proposition of federated systems is attenuated by it's downsides (slow evolution).
Meanwhile people get killed based on metadata. Seems like a more urgent problem to tackle.
You're right that people get killed based on metadata, which is why it's in our sights in the longer term. But our focus is first on features that make the system actually compete effectively with its centralised counterparts (encrypted decentralised Slack or WhatsApp style use cases), otherwise in practice nobody's seriously going to use it. And secondarily on protecting metadata, especially given there's stuff like Ricochet & Briar that you can use today if you're doing something where you really need the metadata protection today.
And on Android and ChromeOS, it isn't exposed to user space, so kind of irrelevant and can be changed at any moment, e.g. Fuchsia.
The only place where Linux really made it, was replacing expensive proprietary UNIX servers with free (gratis) clone.
> And on Android and ChromeOS, it isn't exposed to user space, so kind of irrelevant
Sure, and I can run Windows applications on Wine, so Windows is kind of irrelevant. Don't be silly.
> The only place where Linux really made it, was replacing expensive proprietary UNIX servers with free (gratis) clone.
Except you're forgetting that these expensive UNIX servers were supposed to be replaced by Windows NT (later Windows Server) machines. So you'd have Windows at every level and could hire a point-and-grunt "sysadmin" to run it all at a much lower TCO. That's the grand vision that we've been spared.
And you forgot about the embedded market. Hell, my TV runs Linux and I didn't even know (my wife chose it) until I was poking about in the menus and found a copy of the GPL. And you also omitted Cloud Servers, where Linux is hugely dominant. Oh, and Supercomputing where 499 of the Top500 Supercomputer run Linux.
But yeah, apart from embedded, phones, tablets, laptops, servers, cloud servers and supercomputers...what has Linux ever done for us?
Talk to me in a couple of years, now that everyone is migrating to BSD style licenses, while trying to replace the whole stack (clang, Fuchsia, ...).
Had the *BSDs won against GNU/Linux, and I bet all proprietary UNIXes would still be around.
A TV running Linux is worthless if there isn't a way to update the firmware, how do update yours?
>Talk to me in a couple of years, now that everyone is migrating to BSD style licenses
Nonsense, Linux is more popular and more widely used than ever. You were saying the same things two years ago, right? I suppose you'll still be saying the same two years from now.
> Had the BSDs won against GNU/Linux*
The BSDs aren't against Linux (except in the minds of some overly zealous BSD fanboys). The popularity of Linux has increased the popularity of the BSDs. They've helped each other.
EDIT: Oh yes, Containers! How could I forget containers! Just add it to the list...
Ah the Pyrrhic victory, it is there but out of reach!
> Nonsense, Linux is more popular and more widely used than ever. You were saying the same things two years ago, right? I suppose you'll still be saying the same two years from now.
Yep, and if Google does release Fuchsia, lets see who is right.
A man can dream one day we'll have a phone with a baseband chip we can control, a RISC-V core we can program, no?
So it's perfectly feasible to have a small market device like this if the market price covers the cost of buying chipsets off the shelf, and assembling them.
How many people worked on Xerox Alto? They had to do everything from scratch, including bootstrapping their own tools and they had far worse computing capabilities/hardware available to them at the time.
For one thing, it looks like they are leaving much of the development up to the wider community. Gnome/Plasma will handle the UI for instance. Mozilla and Canonical tried to experiment to much with the interface and build too much of it from scratch. Even MS was to "innovative", the had all the parts in place to build a better android but they wanted to put tiles in.
In my case, the problem actually doubles, because I'm on Verizon. Verizon IS required to support any compatible device, but few niche developers are willing to submit their devices for certification. :/ I suspect there would be a significant value if someone could get a free software-based module submitted to https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/design-and-build...
Yes, it is very hard, and I hope they'll succeed this time.
> In my case, the problem actually doubles, because I'm on Verizon.
Can you ditch Verizon for T-Mobile? They are more flexible.
They also started the entire anti-net neutral trend with throttling video, zero rating content from specific providers, etc. Which the others carriers were unfortunately all too willing to copy.
It is hard to see from either a technical or ethical standpoint how T-Mobile is better.
Palm's webOS is an html/js based mobile phone OS that predated the JS based excitement.
For example, if there was a device that focused on running progressive web apps well, there would be a market today than compared to the past when horsepower wasn't at the level it is at now.
The flip side is also being able to run these sorts of operating systems on more devices.
I use my phone more and more for computer replacement tasks on Android. Would be neat to be able to run the odd android app in a container, etc.
How does that explain the failure of FirefoxOS?
With today's PWAs it would be a wonderful OS.
In Mozilla's case it was an inability to define a market more than the technology stack. I had a Flame. While the OS started a little rough around the edges, by Firefox OS 2.5 it was perfectly usable as a daily driver with modest specs by 2017 standards.
Even here, most people buy Chromebooks to replace ChromeOS with an usable version of GNU/Linux, just like we used to do with Windows 95/98 back in the day.
https://hackaday.io/project/19035-zerophone-a-raspberry-pi-s...
http://www.davidhunt.ie/piphone-a-raspberry-pi-based-smartph...
The RPi is the one of the most open of all the SBC (Single Board Computers) currently on the market:
https://anholt.github.io/twivc4/
https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
What that says about other SBC, I'll leave up to you to decide.
Straight from the rpi-open-firmware repo:
> Does it boot Linux? Yes, with some conditions. You can boot a very minimal version of Linux without the firmware and get it to work with UART and eMMC. Support for USB, DMA, and Ethernet are in the works.
The default firmware and Raspbian environment involve many non-free blobs.
In the case of the open-source VC4 drivers (GPU driver), these are being written by a Broadcom employee (in his spare time). Broadcom are the company behind the SoC that is at the core of the RPi. So you have a person with access to technical documentation from the company that makes the device writing the drivers. Regardless of whether they get paid or not, the drivers are of high quality, they've even made it into mainline Linux, so they work out of the box. There's very few SBC that have similar levels of open source support for their GPUs.
As for the firmware, yes it does need more work to be a true replacement for the standard one. However, it's a fixed target, and there are people willing to put in the work, so it's only a matter of time before it improves further. That said, I'm sure more assistance would be welcome.
Unfortunately, the current end result seems to be a Linux that doesn't even have support for USB or ethernet.
There are so many SBCs these days it's hard to enumerate all of them, but this board looks more open than RPi. I think it uses Vivante/Etnaviv graphics. http://www.imx6rex.com/open-rex/
That's over 5x the price for the cheapest model (iMX6 OpenRex SBC Basic, €199 in quantity 1, http://www.voipac.com/#category3 ), at that price you'd be better off getting an x86 board.
> "Unfortunately, the current end result seems to be a Linux that doesn't even have support for USB or ethernet."
You forgot a word at the end of that statement... " yet". Furthermore, expensive outliers like the OpenRex aside, it's still currently more open than its main competition.
That said, I shouldn't be so critical. The state of free graphics drivers on ARM SBCs is pretty abysmal and any improvement is a good thing. Mostly I object to the assertion "RPi is a free and open platform," but rereading your original post you didn't actually say that. Perhaps we should say "RPi is one of the least-closed platforms." It will be great to see the FOSS VC4 drivers mainlined into the Linux kernel.
Survey of FOSS ARM graphics drivers https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ3MTM
Hardware that can run the Lima free graphics driver: https://limadriver.org/Hardware/
Hardware that can use the Etnaviv free graphics driver: https://github.com/etnaviv/etna_viv#socs-with-vivante-gpu
I said "most open". You said "least closed". In my opinion that's the same thing, just with a different spin.
EDIT, example of boards that have do sources available: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/open-source-ha...
There's no usable open source driver for Mali GPUs (the Lima project got the closest, but it's stalled: https://limadriver.org/ ), so the A20 does not have "sources available".
I know I personally have a lot of "needs" that aren't being met by the current smart-phone options.