The FSF's Librephone project

[Posted October 14, 2025 by corbet]

The Free Software Foundation has announced the launch of the Librephone project, which is aimed at the creation of a fully-free operating system for mobile devices.

Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 14, 2025 22:29 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses)

The state of smartphone sofware is growing ever-crappier, but I hope the FSF doesn't let their highly myopic "RYF" attitude scuttle this effort before it ever gets started.

Nearly all modern hardware requires some sort of proprietary firmware blob to function... But those blobs barely register as a rounding error on the grand scheme of things (eg mandatory DRM and always-on ties to a datamining mothership)

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 0:37 UTC (Wed) by ttuttle (subscriber, #51118) [Link]

Unfortunately, it sounds like that's exactly what they plan to do here.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 0:42 UTC (Wed) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link] (1 responses)

Having a phone with kernel and userland drivers from postmarketOS and the Android UI from LineageOS would be a nice baseline from a usability perspective (Android apps available, and still kernel+userland completely free).

I love my postmarketOS phone and it is the most mobile Linux "desktop" I ever had, but it fills a different niche (Linux+mobile feeling) compared to the Android feeling. For me, right now the answer for "postmarketOS vs. LineageOS" is "both", each on its own device.

That said, I mostly agree with the previous poster on the unfortunate requirement of proprietary firmware blobs as those are not likely to go away soon. Having a free Android-style kernel+userland combined with firmware blobs is probably a realistic 2-year goal on a very limited set of phones. If blob-free implementations are a hard requirement, the easiest way to go forward is to remove/outsource the mobile radio functionality to a dedicated device and use VoWiFi on a blob-free handset. That way you could even get a RYF certification for the handset because the blobs live in a different device. The usuability would be severely limited, though.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 1:01 UTC (Wed) by ttuttle (subscriber, #51118) [Link]

I mean, what you've described -- considering both parts -- isn't something most people would consider a phone.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 1:09 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

Not only that, those blobs are actually better (for the user) than if they were hard-coded into the chips. A blob can be upgraded (proprietary or not), plus it's a lot cheaper. The FSF is ok with hardware that implements a function, no matter how complicated or buggy, but not with blobs that implement the same function and can be upgraded.

In the context of CPU microcode the FSF's attitude is even worse, as well laid out here.

In the context of mobile phones, are they planning to develop the hardware as well as the software? Because commercial manufacturers will have zero interest in doing so.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 1:34 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

The FSF is ok with hardware that implements a function, no matter how complicated or buggy, but not with blobs that implement the same function and can be upgraded.

With modern hardware, this distinction is even less meaningful because the hardware is likely synthesized from VHDL or Verilog, which you could look at as being software written for a very weird machine architecture. So even the hardware itself is really just "frozen" software.

Perfection is the enemy of good

Posted Oct 15, 2025 2:15 UTC (Wed) by mikebenden (guest, #74702) [Link]

> With modern hardware, this distinction is even less meaningful [...] So even the hardware itself is really just "frozen" software.

I happen to fully agree with this perspective (hardware is a program compiled into a graph of gates, then either carved into silicon or configured into an fpga).

Working on that premise, where *should* the line rightfully be drawn between "give the users source so as to respect their freedom" vs. "it's obtuse of <insert activist / organization name here> to insist that source at/below this level of abstraction be provided so as to respect users' freedom" ?