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Comment by pergadad | Hacker News Reader

A very laudable effort and hopefully it goes well. But to be clear, the first ethical smartphone is Fairphone. I don't see how exactly this one could get even close to trying to be ethical in the way Fairphone does, but it might just be me having a different understanding of 'fair'.

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Depends if we're talking about ethical atoms or bits.

Don't want to support conflict mining, but are okay with Android on a Qualcomm SoC = Fairphone

Don't want to run a non-free OS or integrated baseband, but are okay with manufacturing in Shenzhen = Purism Librem

This seems to be a mirror of the old language debate in open source. So the Librem 5 is ethical as in speech and not ethical as in beer. "Ethical" being a philosophical designation here rather than a physical designation.

Ethical in technology freedom, not ethical in labor standards.

Well fairphone was even more of a gimmick than this one. Other than word fair, it was equally useless as all other phones due to the usual planned obsolescence and lack of software. This one, assuming it ships, will at least be serviceable if they get a mainline stack running without too many blobs. That doesn't make it practical or attractive, but at least you won't be forced to chuck it in the bin after a couple of years due to lack of software.

Which Fairphone? The original or Fairphone 2? Mistakes were made with the original Fairphone. The SoC couldn't be updated to a newer kernel version and the binary blobs meant they couldn't get any update past Android 4.x. Which sucks if you bought that smartphone, but doesn't mean the company did not learn from that mistake. Also, replacement parts weren't available either because the company couldn't source them in great amounts due to lack of funds. Some replacement parts required components which weren't made anymore. They had some initial problems with this in the release after FP2 but they tackled these.

And I really really hope this is better than the Fairphone 2 in terms of function. I bought one very much excited by the prospect but to be frank it was the worst phone qua phone I've ever owned with basic functionality continuously breaking. A massive shame because the cleared up supply chain was something I really wanted to work out.

As I see it, Purisim has been doing OS pieces for their laptops, whereas Fairphone was starting from scratch.

Fairphone is only ethical if you buy into the marketing about the minerals being ethically sourced.

Which you shouldn't, for obvious reasons.

> But to be clear, the first ethical smartphone is Fairphone.

Ethical products don't spy on users. Fairphone uses Android, so it isn't entirely ethical.

I this is due to the overloading of the word ethical. The librem phone behaves ethically, but the Fairphone is ethically sourced (based on comments here). It'd be really neat to have something that's both ethical in behavior and ethically sourced for the parts.

> Ethical products don't spy on users. Fairphone uses Android, so it isn't entirely ethical.

Because customers want Google.

The bootloader is unlocked. If you want to install Fairphone Open then you can. That's an Android version sans Google/OpenGapps. [1]

If you want, you can also install different firmware. Examples: LineageOS (with or without OpenGapps), LineageOS + microG, SailfishOS, UBTouch.

[1] https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fp-osos/index.html

Can you add your own key to the bootloader and lock it again staying on your own firmware?

AFAIK you cannot. Is that ever possible, on any unlocked bootloader?

FWIW, the SoC is a SD801.

I wonder if it would be possible to implement that feature on an Android device that allowed you to flash your own custom appsboot/lk? I've only spent a little bit of time in LK stuff, but it seemed to me that that was where that functionality lives.

From leaked LG LK code it shows that's definitely where their bootloader unlock keys lived [at one point a couple of years ago].

Since the Librem device is a different beast, though, I wonder what their bootstack looks like? Super curious now!

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