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Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

I think they will fail because they fundamentally don't understand the problem.

Android does not contain binary blobs because of some evil conspiracy against free software. If they could get away with it, the whole damn thing would be open source.

The problem is those blobs do things that interact with complex hardware for which only blobs are available. Even if you reverse engineer them, you are going to get sued into oblivion because of the patents you are going to need to infringe on to make functional replacements.

But even if you get a blessing from the component manufacturers, your new hippie binary blobs need to be certified to legally operate on cellular and wifi frequencies in most parts of the world. If you decide you don't like something and change it - as is the open source way - that new version with your modifications needs to be certified too. Carriers do not allow uncertified devices on their networks.

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The blobs are there to assure you need to throw away your perfectly fine phone every 3 years due to lack of software updates.

If it all was open source, the community could quite easily provide updates - you can run a modern Linux distro on 10+ years old laptop just fine.

> If they could get away with it, the whole damn thing would be open source.

Who is "they"? Certainly not Google. Google has been moving open-source Android functionality into the closed-source Google Play Services for many years.

No one is going sue the fsf into oblivion. The movement has decades of legal experience, if a company would be dumb enough that company would just burn money and lose. Especially about reverse engineering software, as if patents had any power there. Apple, the end boss in that regard, not fighting on that level against the m1 project is proof enough.

Second, fuck the carriers. Certifications will not persist as soon as real Foss phones are available. Nothing persists against a world of free hardware invading a realm. And even if: freeing everything around a modem blob would still be a big step forward.

It's frankly ridiculous to assume the people working on this and the organisation that already supported replicant knowns nothing about the mobile space.

I understand it might seem confusing if you are not familiar with the requirements, but they are not trivial to bypass.

Cell phones operate in licensed radio spectrum, so they need to have proper testing and certification (https://www.fcc.gov/oet/ea/rfdevice). Any device not properly certified would be illegal to manufacture or import into the US.

Separately cellular networks require PTCRB certification of the devices to ensure they are interoperable with the network (https://www.ptcrb.com/). The FSF could in theory write custom firmware for baseband and wifi chips, but they would need to seek certification as this would be considered a substantial modification. It would likely require cooperation from the chip manufactures to provide samples with various testing/debugging harnesses enabled.

Qualcomm and the like would probably sue to stop the FSF on the basis that it could put their own device certifications into jeopardy.

That isn't even touching on non-transmitting components like GPUs or sensors where the actual functional logic may be split between hardware and software (your blob driver). Even by doing a clean room reimplementation, you risk infringing on software patents, and will have little flexibility to work around them since the hardware will expect things to be done a specific way.

You would think it would be ridiculous to assume the people working on this know nothing about the mobile space, yet their actions do bring that into question.

I think all your concerns are valid but they are not necessarily insurmountable. The FSF or whatever other entity could do just what you suggest and seek certification within the current legal frameworks. They could also talk to the carriers and negotiate individually which is probably going to be quite annoying and slow but it's not impossible and it's not like that's not done in the commercial space. The could build mechanisms into the hard-/firmware that takes your device off whatever regulated spectrum/provider if you modify anything that is in regulated territory (as watched over by some form of maintainer-quorum-signing-negotiation-structure). I'm sure there are many mechanisms and processes one could come up with that could keep with regulatory or other control aspects while still keeping things open.

All that patent and legal business is probably a more important/existential concern and a go/nogo-factor if you want to be a commercial player in a market-driven environment and less so for an entity like the FSF.

This is aounds similar to the objections that were raised against the GNU project in the 80s.

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