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

[Jonathan Petruska]

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
>_______________________________________________
>Replicant mailing list
>Replicant at lists.osuosl.org
>http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant