Are smartphones any good? (was Re: Oneplus One support)

[Michael Spacefalcon]

Allan Mwenda <allanitomwesh at gmail.com> wrote:

> HAHAHA,if only I could. That is a rather gloomy scenario though

My great-grandfathers did it successfully in 1917, and we can do it
again.

To bring this thread back on-topic, a fully-functional (i.e., unlike
OsmocomBB) GSM cellphone whose baseband firmware is available to every
end user in the form of full source code, compiled using gcc and other
Free Software tools (no blobs or proprietary build tools), and
physically reloadable into the phone, again using only Free Software
tools running under a free OS (GNU/Linux or other Unix), is NOT an
impossibility, and it is becoming closer to reality with each passing
day.  The work is being done in a public source repository:

https://bitbucket.org/falconian/freecalypso-sw

Look at the commit history, and see for yourself how steadily this
project marches forward.  As Che Guevara said, this movement is
growing stronger with each passing day, it will never stop.

All the talk about legalities is nothing more than a scarecrow.  Does
your country's police force employ psychics with extremely advanced
extrasensory perception capabilities?  If not, how are they going to
divine that the ordinary-looking cellphone in your hand or your pocket
or your purse lacks some needed regulatory approval if its actual
radio signal emissions are identical to those from any other correctly
functioning GSM cellphone?  And how are they going to divine that a
cellphone that physically looks just like any other (standard
commercial quality plastics and all) contains firmware which some
believe might infringe on some copyrights held by some ancient company
which might not even exist any more?

VLR,
SF