[ux266478]

All phones end up reliant on proprietary blobs. Not that I disagree in principle, but we have to be realistic. Hardware manufacturers, telcoms and to some degree regulators all do not like user freedom with regards to phones.

[zb3]

But AOSP is open source while Sailfish OS is not. Also "proprietary blobs" != "proprietary blobs" (there's varying level of obfuscation/debug info).

[mariusor]

Which proprietary blobs in Sailfish OS are worse than the others you were referring to?

[wiseowise]

Whole OS?

[mariusor]

There are driver blobs for the underlying device which they can't do much about, and then there are the last vestiges of Lipstick (the Sailfish OS UI), which are not released under an open source license. That's hardly "the whole OS", since everything else is a plain linux distribution.

[m4rtink]

Basically all the middleware in Sailfish OS was always open source and many of the apps as well. They have been also IIRC finally open sourcing the primary apps as there are no longer pesky external investors forcikg them to keep things closed for weird reasons.

[nebula8804]

Isn't the Librem 5 fully open?

[ux266478]

No. The touchscreen firmware's source is not distributed[1] for one, and neither is the firmware for the baseband processor. Possibly more aspects.

Although "open" doesn't matter as much as "libre" does. Modifying source code is useless if you can't actually replace the running instance. It has all the same problems as closed source software. Baseband processors are legally required to be tivoized, thus the violation of user freedoms is encoded in law. Quite frankly, I think it's a huge mistake on the part of regulators. If somebody wanted to do undesirable things on cellphone bands, they can simply build their own transciever for it and there's effectively no way to stop that. These regulations aren't a real security measure, not even security through obscurity. Making a transmitter for a certain band is trivial if all you're doing is causing interference. If the malicious actor is doing more than just that, it already requires a strong understanding of RF principles such that they already effectively posses the knowledge to make an appropriate transciever. All regulators effectively do here with Tivoization is protect potential back doors and security vulnerabilities from being mitigated.

[1] - https://docs.puri.sm/Hardware/Librem_5/advanced/firmware.htm...

[nebula8804]

Darn well thats a damn shame. The phone compromises so much "nice to have" features to get to the supposed "privacy respecting" label. Its a shame they didn't actually go all the way. Seems like then all we really have in terms of communication devices is the BeTrusted platform (Precursor communication device)

[ux266478]

The Precursor greatly interests me. Do you have personal experience with it?

[nebula8804]

I have used it at events and it looks quite solid but is really niche. Still my mind loves the idea that it exists.

[fsflover]

> firmware

You're not wrong, but it's the only phone in the world running an FSF-endorsed OS that has no blobs. We should celebrate and support that and not demand something impossible.