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

Jonathan Petruska bubbly193 at y7mail.com
Sat Oct 4 00:29:06 UTC 2014


I'm sure if B2G and Ubuntu Touch really kickoff Mozilla and Canonical will want to work more and more with companies that don't use much proprietary hardware, potentially  leading eventually to a cellphone completely absent of proprietary hardware.  This may be highly unlikely (B2G doesn't look like it will get too much real support, and who knows when/if we'll see a truly stable release of Touch) but I don't think a fully free cellphone is too unthinkable.  Has anyone thought of porting to mini arm PCs like the Pi, or has this already been done; I know there are some built specifically for Android (CuBox, Pandaboard, etc.).  I like the idea of Replicant in the tablet world (If you can roughly consider Replicant/Android on mini PCs akin to tablets).

msokolov at ivan.Harhan.ORG wrote:

>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
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