FSF turns forty with a groundbreaking new project and a new president
fsf.org
fsf.org
> Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF to bring full computing freedom to mobile computing environments. The LibrePhone Project is a partnership with Rob Savoye, a developer who has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since the 1980.
I found very little info about it online. There is this github org:
which mirrors PostMarketOS: https://github.com/LibrePhone/pmOS, 'The Linux distribution for mobile devices and beyond…'
Probably not related, it's unlikely that the FSF would host anything on GitHub.
Can they really not find ANYONE outside their bubble? A phone lives and dies by its UI and they pick someone who primarily does toolchain/CLI work? I don't get it.
1) Too few developers to keep up with new Android releases, or with devices becoming obsolete over time. They got stalled trying to update to Android 11 (2020) and never finished.
2) Refusing to support newer devices that doesn't meet their demands (e.g. must have a removable battery). Turns out, the market doesn't respond to the demands of a small open-source project.
Just skip a version. The world won't end.
If you're trying to maintain a fork of a large open-source project, and especially one which needs to interoperate with external systems like Android, keeping up with upstream releases is not optional. The upstream will move on without you.
Side note - if FSF wants its message to reach a wider audience and get more people to care about free software it should really get out of its own bubble. Why wasn't this streamed and archived on YouTube? Yes, this is a rhetoric question - I know perfectly why. My point here is - and let me make a colorful analogy:
If you're, say, a Scientology missionary, what the hell is the point of preaching inside of your own church, to people who are already Scientologists? If you want to be an effective missionary you go out where the non-believers are, and you don't immediately tell people about Xenu, the planetary ruler from 70 million years ago, or else they'll immediately dismiss you and think you're batshit crazy. You ease them in step-by-step.
FSF puts ideological purity as an absolute number one (e.g. recommend Trisquel GNU/Linux, which is pretty much unusable on most machines for normal people), and they refuse to spread the message on platforms where non-free-software people are (e.g. YouTube), and then we're all surprised that the free software movement is dying, and non-copyleft licenses are dominating (although, yes, there are other reasons for that too).
I do not see the FSF as an effective organization today.
What is fsf’s equivalent of Xenu that they shouldn’t tell you about up front? I want to say you should need to be at least level 3 at fsf before learning about rms.
The TDP of a lot of existing phone chips (e.g. various Snapdragons) is often 10-15W. Ryzen 7 5800U and various others are configurable down to those numbers. Why has no one ever put one in a phone or in a tablet with a cell modem?
Where is Dell or Framework or any of these young companies from China that want to take a dent out of Samsung? Where, for that matter, is Samsung?
Trolls come out to say there is no demand for it, but do the math. Having open source drivers doesn't make your chip less attractive to the people who don't care about that, so if you design the chip you still get all of those sales and the ones from the people who do care. Meanwhile the other incumbents are hidebound and myopic, so if your hardware creates a software ecosystem that depends on it, you'll have it to yourself for a decent while before the recognition that you're getting 100% of those sales because you're the only one providing the hardware documentation they need can permeate through the relevant layers of the incumbent's bureaucracy. And by then you've reinvested that revenue into making a better chip than them.
First mover advantage is valuable.
I would love whatever they put forward to succeed, but I have to guess this is them aligning an endorsement/marketing around a current project such as PostmarketOS