The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the Librephone project with the objective of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. It’s a strategic shift for the organization that recognizes that more users now rely on a mobile phone to do the majority of their computing, instead of a computer.
With the Librephone project the FSF has committed itself to bringing its four freedoms of being able to study, change, share, and modify programs on mobile.
"Forty years ago, when the FSF was founded, our focus was on providing an operating system people could use on desktop and server computers in freedom. Times have changed, technology has progressed, but our commitment to freedom hasn"t," said Zoë Kooyman, executive director of the FSF. "A lot of work has been done in mobile phone freedom over the years that we"ll be building on. The FSF is now ready to do what is necessary to bring freedom to cell phone users. Given the complexity of the devices, this work will take time, but we"re used to playing the long game."
The Librephone project’s practical goal is to close the last gaps between existing Android distributions and full software freedom. This could turn into a project that takes a while, in fact it almost certainly will, however, in the immediate, the focus is on investigating device firmware and proprietary binary blobs present in other mobile freedom projects.
One of the so-called freedom projects where FSF will be starting is LineageOS, which has done a lot of work to prioritize free software already, but still uses proprietary modules copied from the phone firmware. The FSF wants to reverse-engineer and replace the remaining nonfree software components to build a fully free Android-compatible operating system.
To get the Librephone project off the ground, the FSF has hired an experienced developer, Rob Savoye, to lead technical aspects of Librephone. Savoye has an extensive background in the FOSS world having worked on DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, embedded systems, and project manager. He said that he is looking forward to helping users gain control over their phone hardware.
This project’s initial work will be funded by a donation that has been made by FSF board member John Gilmore. Gilmore is known for being one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Librephone project will also help existing developers and projects that are working toward a full free and functional Android-compatible OS. To this end, Savoye has asked the community to please join in through code or financial contributions. A dedicated project website is available and users can also connect using IRC via #librephone on irc.libera.chat.
Source: FSF