Free the last bits of "anything Android"?
My positive thought about this is that #PostmarketOS and #MobileLinux in general will profit from any public knowledge about hardware it could run on.
If I understood correctly the money for doing the work on the #Android blobs is donated by John Gilmore. His Money, his decision where to put it. And there is a positive effect, but there is also a negative one:
Android is based on ideas by #Google. To free it we'd need to fork it and adopt it to different ideals and goals. Android is designed to maximize the profit of Google.
It is not designed with the users well-being and interests as the primary goal.
Just replacing blobs in Android keeps the ecosystem the same, promotes Google and their goals and leaves the control over design decisions for Android in Googles hands.
Once a device is freed by hard work of a few engineers it will be old, it will be uninteresting for people looking at Android and the latest shiny hardware running it.
But still - Mobile Linux will make good use of those devices as free OSes in general do when it comes to hardware left behind by commercial OSes.
@me @fsf @fsfe This is important work, and a key piece of the puzzle for freeing our mobile devices. The other key is making it a right to unlock the bootloader and replace the operating system on devices that we own. Without that, all those users are still stuck on Android even if a perfect alternative exists. We believe this should be the next thing that the #DigitalMarketAct (#DMA) addresses.
@guardianproject@librem.one @fsf@hostux.social @fsfe@media.fsfe.org
In my opinion this will end in a race we'll loose: the companies building the hardware do not profit only from the price customers pay when they buy the device.
Part of the profit comes from the services imposed on the customers who can't help this.
If we start to help the users of those devices free themself from the imposed services we help them break the profit the vendor makes through #SurveillanceCapitalism.
The vendors then will find ways to stop us helping the people to break out of surveillance capitalism by installing different software.
We might find some cooperation when it comes to devices for which the vendor does not think it is profitable to support them anymore: they are under pressure to recycle those devices to reduce e-waste. We could give them an argument to say that these devices are still perfectly good for being used with alternative systems.
There might be a chance that we're allowed to clean up after the big companies took there profit and horded their customers on to new shiny products still running their imposed services and closed source.
I understand that we'd love to give everybody out there the same experience plus the additional freedom for whatever they use. But people have to free themself which might mean give up on some addiction and start over with something new.
People are asking again and again if I miss something on my #MobileLinux phone, how I avoid this or how I solved that. It works for me, because I put learning and admin work in making it work.
I believe that uniting forces we could bring the #MobileLinux ecosystem into a state in which it will be attractive to users without much technical knowledge.
I think we can't force companies to build hardware with less return to their invest. Once the DMA will force them to do so, they'll react by whatever means.
@guardianproject @me @fsf @fsfe it should indeed be made clear what it means to earn 'ownership' of a device when paying money
@guardianproject @me @fsf @fsfe in my opinion users only need a hardware device with unlocked bootloader and let users to install any OS of their choise... That would be the real freedom....