[mbrumlow]

There is security, and then there is freedom. You can have the most secure system in the world -- but if there are state sponsored, or company back back doors it means nothing.

In FOSS initiatives spent ages building fee and and open software, combating proprietary systems and software that they had no control over.

All that would be loss just to give it up now that we have moved from PCs to phones....

I for one want control over all the software I run on hardware I own. I am not sure why we are so willing to give that control up simply because the platform changed.

[KirinDave]

> There is security, and then there is freedom. You can have the most secure system in the world -- but if there are state sponsored, or company back back doors it means nothing.

Okay, so you're saying: "If a backdoor is present than your security prioritization doesn't matter, the result is bad." I understand, but:

1. If there is a back door in open source code that goes unnoticed (and it certainly does) because of persistent but bad practices in the open source community (e.g., a stubborn refusal to stop using C-like memory management semantics and primitives when dealing with untrusted inputs), then why don't said accidentaly backdoors invalidate the open source work?

2. Does "control" actually matter in the context of AOSP? Strictly speaking, you have essentially everything you need up utill you hit the hardware drivers. You can easily rewrite that to your hearts content.

3. Given Librem's recently move into commodity-based social products (and the poop-from-great-height attitude they initially adopted), are you genuinely sure that they're actually trustworthy actors? If they're coerced, how will yu attest that they never injected a deeply subtle backdoor on millions of lines of code which you'd like to be unique and less scrutinized?

I can't really work out why you feel the way you do, so I ask these questions.

[soraminazuki]

> persistent but bad practices in the open source community (e.g., a stubborn refusal to stop using C-like memory management semantics and primitives when dealing with untrusted inputs)

This applies to the entire industry. It's not something specific to the open source community. It's also extreme to call the use of C as "bad practice," as any language has its own strengths and weaknesses.

[pjmlp]

Not the entire industry, as many companies have thankfully moved on from plain old C, or at very least reduced its use quite considerably.

BSD/Linux derived FOSS is still the C stronghold.

The Morris worm was in 1988, since then C has collected enough CVEs due to memory corruption issues to consider its use bad practice.

Something that even Apple, Google and Microsoft security reports now advise against, and with Google actively engaging into taming C's usage in Linux kernel.

[Nursie]

> BSD/Linux derived FOSS is still the C stronghold.

Oh that's ok then, it's not like that accounts for most of the world's server and embedded infrastructure, open or otherwise...

[orbifold]

The operating system is only a tiny fraction of commercial code out there most of which is either written in (more) memory safe languages like Java, C# or C++. SAPs code base alone is 1 billion lines of mostly C++ and their own proprietary scripting language.

[Nursie]

Wait, is C++ memory safe?

I know they've introduced a lot of ways that memory management becomes easier or automatic, but I'm not sure you can call it "memory safe" can you?

[pjmlp]

How are they doing in the desktop and mobile OS worlds?

And regarding embedded space, AUTOSAR now requires C++14.

I think there are enough computers with wheels to deem it relevant.

[Nursie]

Desktops are dwarfed by mobiles devices. AFAICT a linux kernel variant is present on most of the world's smartphones (with most of the rest being iOS devices, which I know little about), though you've addressed that by saying Google are pushing to reduce the impact of C underlying their system.

I don't want to make a song and dance about C being awesome or anything - we've certainly got massive issues with allowing that extreme amount of flexibility without ensuring that the developer really, really means what they've just told the machine to do - but it's hardly a small enclave that's holding out, it's still huge.

And there are still companies developing in it. I've seen a sort-of-microservices-in-C-implemented-as-a-sort-of-supersized-cgi-bin approach relatively recently.

And yes it was an abomination!

[dahfizz]

Why do you assume that OSS has more bugs than proprietary software? I would probably argue the opposite.

With OSS you get more people working on a project that actually care. A proprietary business project prioritizes making money over actually creating a good product everyone loves.

You're right that this is not a perfect solution. All software has bugs and all software may have malicious back doors. I just find it much easier to trust the development that happens in the open with community involvement than the development that happens in secret where I have absolutely no way see what's going on.

If you had an inkling that someone was trying to poison you, would you rather eat the food you watched be prepared or the food that was prepared in secret? Both dishes might be poisoned, but it's reasonable to prefer the one you were able to examine.

[KirinDave]

> Why do you assume that OSS has more bugs than proprietary software? I would probably argue the opposite

I don't. But nor do I assume it has less. My point, as restated elsewhere, is that from a user's point of view Openness of Source is more about protecting against negligence.

[andrenth]

I feel google is really turning into Microsoft. These are the same anti open source talking points / FUD you’d see in the early 2000s.

[KirinDave]

Who exactly is talking about anti-openness here? We're talking about which open source piece of code to reuse. Someone gave a bad argument against one company's offering.

Microsoft of the 90s, which no one emulates these days and it's a wrongheaded comparison anyways, would have said that all the open options are bad to begin with.

If you meant to say "anti-free software" then maybe we could have a conversation, but that's hardly the problem Microsoft faced in the 90s and 2ks.

Seriously, what does your post mean? Could you maybe be specific? And while we're at it, what's your connection if any with the company that sells Purism phones.

[andrenth]

“Open source is not safer because people won’t read the source”, “having control doesn’t matter”, and trying to raise doubts about the trustworthiness of the people involved... that’s old Microsoft textbook approach.

At least MS wasn’t built on open software, unlike Google.

> And while we're at it, what's your connection if any with the company that sells Purism phones.

None at all. I’ve just heard of this project a few days ago via a DDG search.

Believe it or not, not everyone is a corporate shill.

[KirinDave]

> Open source is not safer because people won’t read the source

That's not what I said. To sum it up: Open source is not really a security proposition. It eliminates problems related to negligence.

> having control doesn’t matter

In what concrete way does the Purism OS give you more control over your device than AOSP?

It really seems like you are confusing open source and free software for this entire conversation, as literally every line of code we are discussing is shared under a license that allows you to look at, modify and use as you see fit.

> None at all. I’ve just heard of this project a few days ago via a DDG search.

The depth of your consideration was already fairly easy to guess, but thanks for being honest.

> Believe it or not, not everyone is a corporate shill.

Physician, heal thyself.

[supportlocal4h]

Bad software is bad whether it's open or not. But historically, closed software has more lock-in. If a particular open lib or component is bad, it can often be fixed by somebody who didn't create it. Or, for those who don't want to touch the scary hairball, it can often be replaced by a completely new hairball written from scratch by a completely different party. Even if there's nothing broken with the original, open software is friendlier to alternatives. It might take a bit of work, but you can replace one open part with another just because it's shinier or smaller or faster or not Oracle or whatever.

I don't trust all open source software, but I trust it by default more than I trust closed software. And I know that if something really bad gets exposed the odds of a solid fix are better in open source. I get to see the warts of OSS. There's public criticism over small details on a lot of important projects. That doesn't happen for closed stuff. Sure, a vendor may have four of the brightest devs in that field and they might hash it all out behind closed doors. The open alternative usually has another four of the top 12 minds in that field along with four pretty competent others and they have a better process for hashing it out.

Then there's that other guy who's not in the top 12 who goes it alone and comes up with something spectacular. So three of the four from the other open project jump on board because they can. And since this new project tries very hard to be backwards compatible, it just snaps in as an overnight replacement. That's part of the awesomeness of OSS.

[KirinDave]

It's good then that both options I discussed were open source.

[opencl]

What freedom does PureOS offer that AOSP without Google services lacks?

[groovybits]

I believe there is a general lack of awareness of what AOSP is without Google services and add-ons on top of it.

In some facets, AOSP is not a complete and working OS as is. In particular, I have personally had many issues with GPS location for the past fews years. Out-of-the-box, GPS simply does not work without additional non-free software to help it out. Additionally, many (that is, 95%) of all Android apps that you would find on the Google Play store do not function properly without Google services (which AOSP does not have). Applications that are built to run on stock AOSP are not the 'Snapchats' or 'Instagrams' of the world. They are typically FOSS projects that are built out of passion, but recieve little funding or corporate support.

These shortcomings often carry over to third-party ROMs, such as Lineage.

So in my experience, as someone who used to flash a new Android ROM every week, it is not about freedom - its about basic functionality. One could also argue that, since the world operates on all kinds of propietary platforms that aren't available on stock AOSP, so do we also lack the freedom to use AOSP as our daily driver - simply because it often does not interface properly with these propietary platforms.

Edits: grammer and clarifications

[KirinDave]

In general, until we have open source handset hardware to work with, all fine-tuned sensors and clock hardware support will be bad. This is a problem Linux had for a long time, and it took a ton of effort to partially solve the problem. It seems a bit unfair to blame AOSP for not having drivers for specific hardware, that's not it's function.

The big contribution of Purism phones is that more open hardware. After that, the real question we should ask is, "What software platform can offer us the greatest values in the multi-dimensional optimization problem we face?"

It's true though that you wouldn't just flash AOSP. But it's also true that dismissing Graphene BECAUSE it is based on AOSP is unfair.

[groovybits]

I agree, hardware is a primary concern.

I am not meaning to paint those who work on AOSP or third-party ROMs in a bad light. The work they do is terrific and great for the community. I also do not mean to dismiss any of the fantastic work that Graphene brings to the Android community.

I am simply stating that the biggest difference between Librem and Android is that there are more hurdles to jump through to provide a completely usable and free AOSP phone to an end-user in 2019. Android has been made to host a Google ecosystem, where the Librem 5 is being created to host an open ecosystem.

It sounds like the Purism team identified this issue ahead of time and decided to provide that open hardeware platform for us.

[strcat]

Librem 5 is not open hardware. I also don't understand why you're comparing hardware to an operating system that's perfectly capable of running on top of it with the strengths and weaknesses of the hardware underneath it. You make it sound like AOSP or GrapheneOS wouldn't run on it. I don't think it would make a very good hardware target due to having so many security regressions from the status quo but it could certainly be one of the official targets. Whether or not it's an official hardware target, people will be able to use GrapheneOS on it.

[wuschel]

strcat, many thanks for your interesting explanations.

Could you write more on the state of open hardware, and perhaps point me to open-hardware endeavours that have the slightest chance of success?

I understand that it is an very expensive undertaking to deliver a hardware mashine that is based on an open architecture from the CPU to the actual communication/data storage devices (logical design, actual layout, photolithography, assembly). Since patents on older circuitry must be all expired by now, it must be the lack of money that is the actual stopper for truly open systems.

[opencl]

PureOS seems to have these exact same problems except way worse.

Yes, a significant fraction of Android apps do not work on AOSP without Play Services. And 100% of Android apps do not work on PureOS. F-Droid alone has ~1800 apps. I do not see PureOS or PostmarketOS catching up to that level anytime soon.

FOSS projects that are built out of passion, but recieve little funding or corporate support? Exact same situation on PureOS.

Are the Snapchats and Instagrams of the world going to port their apps over to this entirely new platform when they can't even be bothered to make versions of their Android apps that work without Google's services?

[supportlocal4h]

> 100% of Android apps do not work on PureOS. F-Droid alone has ~1800 apps.

This is a fair point. It's not a huge argument for me because I'm only interested in maybe 20 categories of app and I've never been thrilled with the 30 contenders in each category. For instance, if it has only one browser and that one is Firefox, that will be ok with me to begin with. It won't bother me if there are five other choices in F-Droid. But in general, more choice is good, so I grant that this is an important consideration.

> Are the Snapchats and Instagrams of the world going to port their apps over to this entirely new platform when they can't even be bothered to make versions of their Android apps that work without Google's services?

Android without Google's services is a tiny fraction of Android and a smaller fraction of the whole market. PureOS or anything else with even smaller share can expect to be similarly ignored. But Android sans G seems even less likely to go viral than something else.

For one thing, it's too fractured. There is no AOSP brand. There's a bunch of little no-names that happen to offer AOSP under some name that isn't "AOSP" and has no recognition at all. If two or three lower-tier makers offer "Brand C" phones, it could spark. Maybe not in your neighborhood. But if it catches on in India or Malaysia or Brazil, it might be enough to attract Instagram or Twitter. Remember that those companies don't want to depend on Google. They very much want Google out of the picture.

So a handful of apps can legitimize a new platform that is attracting a million or ten users anyway. Then it becomes perilous not to be on that platform. WhatsApp can't afford to let some up and comer get a foothold just because WhatsApp wasn't available on the viral new platform.

Ahhhhhh. Ok I'm going to quit dreaming for now and get back to work. I'm not holding my breath, but I do think it can happen. It just takes the right lucky timing. There have been so many helps lately that I think if there was something ready to take advantage of these incidents, the timing is right.

[strcat]

> I believe there is a general lack of awareness of what AOSP is without Google services and add-ons on top of it.

That lack of awareness seems to be your own.

> In particular, I have personally had many issues with GPS location for the past fews years. Out-of-the-box, GPS simply does not work without additional non-free software to help it out.

GPS doesn't require Play Services, etc. Play Services provides supplementary network-based location services for providing a coarse, inaccurate location estimate without waiting for a while for a GPS lock. The infrastructure for this is open source and part of AOSP. It has generic, provider-agnostic support for services like supplementary location providers, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, geocoding, etc. Play Services is what provides these on phones with Google Play, but there are alternative implementations used by Amazon and in China.

> Applications that are built to run on stock AOSP are not the 'Snapchats' or 'Instagrams' of the world.

Yet apps like WhatsApp, Facebook's apps, Microsoft's apps, etc. do work without Play Services... despite what you claim. A lot of these mainstream apps do work fine, and there's a large ecosystem of open source apps that are mostly designed to run without Play Services. Providing the Play Services APIs with an alternate implementation and is also certainly possible, although I would prefer a different approach than microG.

How is any of this resolved by moving to a completely different OS with far less privacy and security, none of these mainstream applications you talk about and barely any open source application ecosystem by comparison? I don't get it.

[ocdtrekkie]

You seem to be off on the state of Google Play Services from a real-world standpoint. Case in point: Microsoft's core apps like Outlook and Skype don't work without Google Play Services enabled, even if you find the APKs somewhere other than the Play Store to sideload them.

Microsoft's apps are specifically an example I've given of how closed Android truly is: Even Google's competitors, which have all of the same service capabilities, are essentially forced to use Google Play Services. Especially when you consider the other top HN item today about how Google now essentially requires all apps use a closed source Firebase library for push notifications.

And while yes, Google Location Services is a location provider that slots into Android, you are missing that Google has convinced app developers to call it directly, rather than using the Android location provider. This means that no alternate location provider will do: Google Location Services is hard coded into almost every location-based Android app today.

[beenBoutIT]

If you're willing to make your location known in order to take advantage of location services why wouldn't you want the very best possible service? There are complicated workarounds that can be used in place of Google's location services but none of them are anywhere near as easy to implement for the app developer or as easy to use or as accurate for the end user.

[ocdtrekkie]

GPS doesn't make your location known at all, it's receiving only. It sends information about your location to nobody, it triangulates your position from publicly broadcast signals.

And, I would much rather "make my location known" to about fifty other companies before I would want Google to have it.

[yellowapple]

I used CopperheadOS (without GApps) on a Nexus 6P as my daily driver for almost 2 years. Very few "mainstream" apps worked; they would loudly complain about the lack of Google Play Services, and at best would lose functionality (e.g. Slack, which apparently relies on Play Services for notifications) or at worst would crash either immediately or within a few minutes after launch (multiple reasonably-popular online dating apps had this problem).

In short, of the apps I tried that weren't distributed via F-Droid, most of them suffered from varying degrees of brokenness without Google Play Services (and these same apps work fine on my HTC One M8 and my current-daily-driver OnePlus 5T, both of which run LineageOS w/ GApps).

You're right, though, that "some Android apps work fine" is a better situation than "no Android apps work at all". Hopefully GrapheneOS can leverage that advantage well. It'd just be useful to acknowledge that it ain't all sunshine and rainbows just because it's AOSP-based; whether it's microG or something that ain't a security landmine waiting to blow off someone's leg, addressing that issue with an alternative service provider would be a game-changer, and would readily address the one issue I ever had with CopperheadOS (and - it seems - likely would still have with GrapheneOS).

[nextos]

Have you tried a pure AOSP + F-Droid on Nexus/Pixel or Xperia? It's quite good. The only major drawback are closed drivers. But the userland is nice, open and polished.

My worry with Librem and all those initiatives is that rebuilding an ecosystem like F-Droid takes a lot of effort and time.

[groovybits]

I primarily used a OnePlus 3 (non-3T) and a Nexus 4. The OnePlus 3 seemed to have a very active ROM community.

I tried many of the well-known ROMs: Lineage, Paranoid, Ressurection.

I also tried many of the OnePlus-specific ROMs, that were typically maintained by only one or two devs each.

Most of the features worked perfectly fine on both phones. But the deal-breakers were often the simple things: GPS (w/o downloading extra geolocation database services) and Bluetooth were the kickers for me. These services were consistently spotty across every ROM I tried.

My experience is as of a couple years ago. I have since moved away from the ROM scene, simply because I do not have the time to deal with this sort of stuff anymore.

[beenBoutIT]

A Pixel running stock AOSP with F-droid and Chromium is the bleeding edge of what's possible with open source. There's no better UI/UX in existence and the tragedy of it all is that outside of Android developers and software engineers most people never get to experience it at all.

The reality is that Librem is unnecessary because we have F-droid. There's nothing wrong with F-droid and as time goes on more mainstream apps will continue being brought over.

[petre]

Too bad the Pixel doesn't have a headphone jack, otherwise I would have bought one. I've also heard it was pagued with hardware issues. Stuck on Nexus 5 + LineageOS for the time being.

GrapheneOS is sadly only available on Pixel devices.

[nextos]

Pixel 3a has a jack. Not supported yet by GrapheneOS, but it might be in the future. You can always self-compile your own plain AOSP.

[tdxcbkif]

I am stuck on nexus 5 + lineage. Sadly lineage is stuck on version 14 because of some Bluetooth bug.

[andrepd]

How does microg help with that?

[groovybits]

I tried microg's Lineage image on the OnePlus 3. It was probably the most painless ROM I had ever flashed.

The microg project has been fantastic in providing an open mechanism to interface with Google's services. When I first tried it, I believe they did not yet have a working implementation of all the Google services. Some apps complained about Google services, some did not. You still needed to sign into Google though, which might turn some people away.

For those who want to interface with Google on an open-source ROM, microg's image is probably the way for you.

[pjmlp]

I for one cannot attest how many backdoors this Ubuntu installation might have, and I doubt everyone has the knowledge to validate their complete FOSS stack.