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by strcat 334 days ago
The Librem 5 and Pinephone are closed source hardware with closed source firmware. It's a misconception that they're open source. They have open source drivers, not hardware and firmware.

SailfishOS is not open source itself. It's far less open source than Android which has the Android Open Source Project with the whole base OS.
3 comments
Daviey 334 days ago
AOSP is coming to an end...

https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/comments/1l8rhon/a...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44254540

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strcat 333 days ago
No, someone took an out-of-context screenshot of information conveyed by the GrapheneOS account and misrepresented it. We were describing what a source we described as unreliable told us based on what they said was a leak from Google. You can see we didn't say what was claimed but rather were describing information from a source ("they said", "according to the source"). It was fully clear in the context the screenshot was taken that this was someone's speculation to us based on a leak and that we didn't consider it reliable information. Part of it turned out to be correct so we shared the information to discuss it.

Following this, we posted multiple threads correcting inaccurate claims about what we had said about this and made it clear GrapheneOS was continuing. GrapheneOS was fully ported to Android 16 before the end of June, which took longer than usual due to the changes but was still completed.

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lrvick 334 days ago
Open source drivers is a big step forward we must not discount, creating a separation between hardware trust and OS trust.

That said, to your point, both are misrepresented as fully open frequently which is just not true, and obscures efforts by teams that are working on fully open hardware solutions the hard way.

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strcat 333 days ago
> creating a separation between hardware trust and OS trust

Typical Android devices have fully open source kernel drivers. There are usually dozens of closed source libraries in userspace such as the well known Mali GPU driver library. Closed source libraries can still be reviewed. Open source doesn't make something secure and trustworthy. It also isn't a hard requirement to review a library. Auditing a low-level C library doesn't imply finding all the vulnerabilities, particularly something hidden. Widely used open source code still has many vulnerabilities lasting for long periods of time after many people have reviewed it. It does not solve security or trust.

> That said, to your point, both are misrepresented as fully open frequently which is just not true, and obscures efforts by teams that are working on fully open hardware solutions the hard way.

A closed source SoC with open source hardware built around it and other closed source components including radios is not a fully open source computer either.

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mixmastamyk 334 days ago
Purism uses U-Boot on the Librem5 and modified coreboot (in other places) I believe.

https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/board/purism/librem5.html

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strcat 333 days ago
This doesn't mean it's open hardware or that it has open firmware. It has a closed source SoC and many other closed source components. Those components are closed source hardware with closed source firmware.

Snapdragon uses a fork of the open source EDK2 as their bootloader prior to the OS and publishes the source code. It doesn't mean Snapdragon is open source.

Most of the firmware has nothing to do with the boot chain leading up to the OS on the SoC.

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mixmastamyk 333 days ago
That’s standard at a low level I believe. There are almost no open choices way down there, especially with modems.

Looks like they are doing what a small company is able to do.

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