Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit promoting computer user freedom, has announced a long-term project to reverse-engineer and replace proprietary Android files for all systems of the chips (SOCs), aiming to completely free mobile phones for users.
FSF’s initiative, called the “Librephone,” will reverse-engineer any obstacles to full mobile phone freedom and will continue “until its goal is achieved.”
“This is a project to research proprietary files in Android to work towards a long-term goal of free replacements,” the foundation explains.
The project will not create another OS or distribution and has no plans to join other free software projects. Instead, FSF wants to build upon and improve the current state of freedom by replacing proprietary “binary blobs” with open-source code.
“Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom,” the FSF’s press release reads.
“Triaging existing packages and device compatibility to find a phone with the fewest, most fixable freedom problems is the first step.”
Many existing Android projects, including Replicant (Android distribution), LineageOS, and others, move in the same direction. However, non-free binary blobs in firmware, the low-level code that lets the operating system interact with hardware such as GPU, camera, and WiFi modules, limit user freedom.
“The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones,” the FSF said.
Zoë Kooyman, executive director of the FSF, acknowledges that the work will take time, given the complexity of the mobile phones.
“But we’re used to playing the long game,” Kooyman said.
The FSF selected Rob Savoye to lead the technical project. Savoye is an experienced developer known for his work on Gnash, a GNU Project initiative, OpenStreetMap, and others.
John Gilmore, an American activist and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Cypherpunks mailing list, has backed the project, saying he has “enjoyed using a mobile phone running LineageOS with MicroG and F-Droid for years, which eliminates the spyware and control that Google embeds in standard Android phones.”
“I later discovered that the LineageOS distribution links in significant proprietary binary modules copied from the firmware of particular phones. Rather than accept this sad situation, I looked for collaborators to reverse-engineer and replace those proprietary modules with fully free software, for at least one modern phone,” Gilmore said.
It seems that the FSF Librephone project has already begun testing a wide range of Android devices. In the first stage, FSF successfully extracted firmware from dozens of devices, including Google Pixels and others. Librephone is testing phones based on the existing free OS LineageOS.
The new project attracted significant attention in the developer community. On Hacker News, the post attracted hundreds of upvotes and comments, most of which are enthusiastic.
“Finally! It took the FSF long enough to catch up with the overwhelming usage of mobile devices, but it's better late than never,” one of the users said.
However, some skeptics also doubted it would be possible to reverse engineer modern phones with limited resources before they become obsolete.
For 40 years, the FSF has promoted the development and use of free software – particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants – and free documentation for free software.
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