Ethics [LWN.net]

Ethics

Posted Sep 21, 2017 9:41 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Ethics by niner
Parent article: GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

The Fairphone people are sympathetic towards Sailfish OS, which while not entirely free is certainly more so than Android.

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Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 10:46 UTC (Fri) by thomasg (guest, #114185) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, that's just not true.

While it is easily possible to use a completely open source android distribution on many phones (excluding the kernel portion which in all cases will include closed source driver blobs), it is not in any way possible to use a open source sailfish OS.
AOSP does ship most relevant GUI functionality in open source form, while Sailfish does not.

Sailfish is an entirely proprietary operating system which is based on some open source components (most of which not developed by the company behind Sailfish directly). The majority of code written by Sailfish developers is closed.

AOSP is an entirely open source operating system with all developed code being under open source licenses.

Their marketing people really did a good job of convincing the public, that Sailfish is an open source OS. It isn't.
And the driver situation, which is the largest problem of AOSP, is just the same in Sailfish; they use an android kernel after all.

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 11:16 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

Android ≠ AOSP.

It's misleading to say that Sailfish OS contains “some open-source components” because in fact most of the system consists of (open-source) stuff that one would otherwise find on standard Linux machines, including systemd, Wayland, Qt, Python, and so on. The closed-source bits are mostly special GUI components (built on top of Qt) and standard applications (built on top of Qt and Jolla's special GUI components). Jolla has made noises about open-sourcing more (or all) of those, which would probably be a sensible move because many of the standard applications could use some refining, but we will have to see what happens.

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 14:58 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

Regardless AOSP _is_ Android and it is a functional open source mobile phone that you can actually go out and use just using open source code. Sailfish is not.

The closed source bits are typically Google add-ons (optional) vendor add-ons (avoid avoid avoid) and closed source drivers (which depend on the phone/device you are using).

People have tried before to make phones and mobile devices using stuff from 'standard Linux machines'... and they ended up being a terrible match and extremely detrimental to getting a working phone. It's not just technical, but cultural and waffling between QT and Gnome-based environment is a perfect example of why it hasn't worked out.

People really need to study Android and understand why it was successful (example: why the traditional Unix model of users and applications suck for modern ways we use computers) while all the other efforts to build Linux-based phones are not. Otherwise it's just a waste of time if your goal is to have a product that appeals to a larger audience. (if your goal is not that then it is much less of a problem)

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 21:12 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

People have tried before to make phones and mobile devices using stuff from 'standard Linux machines'... and they ended up being a terrible match and extremely detrimental to getting a working phone.

Actually, Sailfish OS works pretty well on my Jolla phone, thank you very much. The hardware isn't that great by today's standards but even so the UI is fairly zippy. It is nice to be able to scp stuff to and from the phone instead of messing about with abominations like MTP. And of course you get to write apps in Python (which I personally greatly prefer to Java). Et cetera …

In any case, the Jolla people must have done something right considering that the phone runs for three days on a single charge, which is something that I never managed to get out of any Android phone.

Ethics

Posted Sep 22, 2017 21:45 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> It is nice to be able to scp stuff to and from the phone instead of messing about with abominations like MTP.

I do that all the time—on Android. There are SSH clients and servers available if you want to use them, and even terminal emulators if you prefer the command-line. (I use Ghost Commander for SSH file transfers, but there are other options.) They're not built in but they are simple to install. Android is perfectly capable of running most of the standard Linux software; see https://termux.com/ for one example which doesn't require root.

> In any case, the Jolla people must have done something right considering that the phone runs for three days on a single charge, which is something that I never managed to get out of any Android phone.

I have an Android phone (a Nexus 5) which has run for most of a week on a single charge. Granted, it didn't have hardly any apps installed, but that's probably the main factor in your battery life as well. Not having any battery-draining mainstream apps available for the platform will do wonders for battery life. Then again, so will turning off the phone.