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319 sats \ 4 replies \ @optimism 17 Oct \ on: DISCUSS: Why is it so hard to design an open-source smartphone? Design
The FSF article (2) explains a bit why it is hard: firmware for many components are closed, also if you go through the open-BOM phones that are generously listed on Wikipedia under (3). Unless these are replaceable components 1 you're still manufacturer/model locked, and what I understood from a friend that has a fairphone, you're also kind of vendor locked; you order replacement components through fairphone.
So a lot of the stuff calling itself open source now is what Stallman would probably go nuts over in a talk as there's a lot of open-source washing going on. Librephone ought to be different, so that's something to keep an eye on. But they've just started building an inventory of everything closed that needs to be replaced, it's in prelim phase.

Footnotes

  1. for example, can you just swap out a Fairphone 6's Qualcomm SM7635 SoC for something else from another vendor? I'm skeptical but would love to be proven wrong. ↩
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100 sats \ 3 replies \ @justin_shocknet 17 Oct
This, who's going to invest the substantial sum required to manufacturing opensource chips at economical scale?
National security states won't make it easy even if there were groups with enough resources to do it... a lot of people will fall out of windows or at least find themselves indicted over a parking ticket if they try undermining the ability to track everyone everywhere all the time.
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67 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 17 Oct
Some of the rockchip SoCs are open source. I've tested a couple including compiling the firmware, and it's not too bad.
But I frankly have no idea how to test it for backdoors. Could be a honeypot.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 17 Oct
There is a rockchip phone https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone_pro/
If anyone can do it'd be a state-industry like China trying to soften the market while giving themselves options outside of US/CIAwan chips, but yea I'm sure there are plenty of asterisks... and opensource design is only one part in the manufacturing the physical thing
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17 sats \ 0 replies \ @halalmoney 17 Oct
Idealists: open source all the things
NSA enters the chat
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