Which phone should I buy for running Replicant?

Wed Sep 25 22:36:22 UTC 2013

Well, the market entry barrier to producing free and open hardware is 
considerably higher than for software. You can write free software if 
you have the skills and a computer. To produce hardware you would need 
equipment that is not easily available to the average individual.

Then it becomes a question of how low-level you can get without the air 
becoming too thin freedom-wise. Is it acceptable if the chip design is 
proprietary? Is it acceptable if the firmware/BIOS etc. is proprietary?

In the latter case there are differences, too. While in a perfect world 
the BIOS of my PC and the firmware for every hardware component in it 
would be free, I can live with a compromise of those things being binary 
blobs as long as they just sit in the device, respond to well-documented 
(and freely available) commands, do their job and let me run free 
software on top of it. A good deal of hardware supported by Linux works 
that way. As for WiFi chips, the GTA02 had WiFi support without the need 
to install binary blobs in the filesystem. GPS is also less of an issue 
as many chips support NMEA or another protocol supported by a free and 
open driver. While not truly free and open, these devices at least have 
an interface that free and open software can use.

Issues arise when the software interfaces are kept secret by their 
manufacturers. A notorious example is the Broadcom GPS chip used in the 
Nexus S and Galaxy S.

Another problem arises where the driver needs to send the firmware to 
the device as part of the initialization process, as that will prevent 
these devices from being used legally with free software. Technically, 
these devices could be made to work with a firmware blob extracted from 
the manufacturer's official driver (which can be for a different OS), 
but shipping that firmware blob with the OS is not a legal option, 
unless the manufacturer releases a redistributable version of their 
binary firmware, which they typically don't.

On 25/09/13 23:39, Dmitriy Nikandrov wrote:
> Don't get you.
>
> I was speaking about proprietary firmware, which is still needed to
> use different hardware. Even if you find totally open driver & maybe
> integrated in Linux kernel.
> Good example is b43 driver
> http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43 - it doesn't work
> without proprietary firmware.
>
>
> 2013/9/25, SheemOn Shapiro <first.sheemon at gmail.com>:
>> You are grossly inaccurate and historically a defeatist.  When we started
>> developing bad Unix and later Linux, everything was closed.  Google was a
>> search engine and no more.  Look at the current Linux source tree and then
>> repeat your statement...
>>   On Sep 25, 2013 9:30 AM, "Dmitriy Nikandrov" <dmitriy.nikandrov at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Not only phones,
>>> but also laptops, desktops, routers, etc... Even Raspberry Pi in it's
>>> heart is closed source.
>>>
>>> The problem is that there is no OPEN HARDWARE chips (with open firmware):
>>> for Wi-Fi
>>> for GSM (even can't be because of patents on core specifications)
>>> for LTE
>>> for GPS
>>>
>>>
>>> 2013/9/25, Nick <replicant at njw.me.uk>:
>>>> Quoth Brian Kemp:
>>>>> To be clear - the driver is free. The firmware is not.
>>>> Gosh, looking at the table on the status page [0] I see that there
>>>> are no devices which have wifi without non-free firmware. So there
>>>> are no phones which have either free wifi or free gsm parts? The
>>>> situation sucks even more than I realised as a casual observer.
>>>> "Sure, you can use your phone freely, so long as you don't want any
>>>> connectivity."
>>>>
>>>> /me sighs.
>>>>
>>>> 0.  http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/ReplicantStatus
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>>>>
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