An updated FSF high-priority project list

http://crna.cc/b/11
http://anholt.livejournal.com/

I believe this should help prevent repeating past mistakes. There have been various mobile Linux efforts. Familiar, OpenMoko, Mer all effectively failed because they did not meet either (b) or (c) and at a glance the same is true for virtually all projects listed on the page you cite (proprietary Android and Cyanogen aside).

Thus, the Fairphone people are probably the ones to talk to. There appears to be interest in running a mainline kernel (https://forum.fairphone.com/t/fp2-compiling-a-blob-free-v...) but no concrete results yet. Booting a minimal Debian with a mainline kernel would probably be a start. Google isn't turning anything up towards that end. Are you aware of any such effort?

Right, yeah, that last sentence of mine was poorly worded. I hadn't meant to ask for something complete. Any effort "working towards that goal" as detailed above would be interesting to me.

> "All commercial mobile phones require proprietary software (in the modem processor that talks to the phone radio network) that has a universal back door: it can be changed remotely through the radio. (...) With funds, the FSF could develop a mobile phone that encapsulates the modem processor so as to make the phone, in a limited sense, safe to use."

Wow, just wow, I hadn't realized just how deep within wishful thinking territory the FSF really was here. For that to work the phone would need to have a separate baseband processor to begin with. That's how smart phone designs were done ten years ago. Today you probably won't even find silicon operating that way. Also, why worry about hypothetical back doors when the front door is wide open?

This is another lesson we should learn from OpenMoko. Fear of back doors expressed by a small but very vocal minority caused OpenMoko to waste a lot of resources on open drivers for non-essential hardware such as the GPS chip rather than writing a minimal, but perfectly reliable dialer so people could use the phone as a, you know, phone and so OpenMoko would actually sell handsets in numbers to keep things commercially viable.

I wish the FSF all the best with their fund raising but the phone part reads too much like an empty promise to lure people into donating money. In that sense I'm trying to avoid repeating my own past mistakes. When Google announced Android I thought mobile Linux was essentially a solved problem. Boy was I wrong.

If we want any tangible results I believe we'll need to take matters into our own hands. Mainlining driver support for e.g. the Fairphone 2 seems like the most plausible avenue to me right now. And I'm afraid some of the regulars over here are much more likely to make that happen than the FSF.

The rest of the stack suffers from a lack of interest. I think that a community-developed project is exactly what's needed. With Plasma Mobile's stack above these hardware issues, we can share most of the code between different devices and make them work well together, and with the right set of priorities in mind, in a transparent process, open standards and open source code. What we need is a more people actually joining in, making hardware work, help us on the code, design, ideas, concepts, bugs, infrastructure, support, developers that make their applications work, and people that "simply" participate in solving the problems we're facing.

The situation in the past two years hasn't been looking good, more and more promising projects are suffering from serious structural problems, are being shut down or admitting defeat. Firefox OS, Jolla, Ubuntu Phone, CyanogenMod all haven't taken on or are already out of existence. In that sense, I think we're worse off from a Free software point of view than we were two years ago. Even Windows Phone is essentially dead. Plasma Mobile isn't, and we've been working on making it a functional platform, but with the current level of resources invested by everyone, it's not enough. This could change, and I'm hopeful that the we can do a good enough job showing that it isn't just a far-away pipe-dream to have phones that actually get us back into control of privacy, security, support and the general technical direction, but that we need people that step up and help us do the work to bring it to a good enough state that phone vendors and carriers that offer phones can ship devices like these. It's not impossible, but it's not an easy or quick problem to solve. It needs some serious commitment by the right people.