> Hello! > > I am told that the Replicant developers are pretty passionate about > user freedom in phones...
True, although even Replicant phones are not 100% free. Perhaps you've already heard that no libre cellular modem exists. At least this part contains proprietary firmware even in the freest phones. Likewise, I never heard of any phone with free wi-fi. Libre Atheros chipsets that are popular among freesw community are supposedly unsutiable (too power-hungry or something) for use in small embedded devices like smartphones. Bootloader and GPS also tend to have freedom problems and modem isolation in today's phones is most often bad. Porting Replicant to a device like PinePhone would solve the bootloader and modem isolation problems and could also make the device more usable. I wonder if and when that gets done. > I just bought a PinePhone. Have ya'll heard about olimex? Some of the > boards could probably be RYF, but only have 1 or 2GB or RAM. If you bought a PinePhone then you might already realize PINE64 has some more powerful boards. I'm writing this from their RockPro64 with 4G RAM and 6 ARM cores running blob-less U-boot. I don't know of any more powerful SBCs at the time being. It's not that PINE is good with regard to everything. They give no option to purchase without nonfree js (this one is unfortnately also true for Olimex), so the only way to avoid it is to order from a reseller. They also use Google's reCaptcha on their forum, so I could not even register to post a question regarding my problems with RockPro's audio subsystem. And their customer support was terrible. Both Olimex and PINE64 do, however, offer some devices with RYF level of freedom and it seems the only thing that makes the certification impossible is their reliance on nonfree js (I once emailed Olimex about this and they unfortunately feel unjustly treated by the FSF because they saw companies with RYF products offer payment methods like PayPal). > I'm tempted to try to do a DIY phone That would be hard. There were and are actual teams of people with monetary investments making efforts towards delivering a libre phone, with PinePhone you mentioned being one of the examples. If what they managed to make has major shortcomings in terms of usability, it is unlikely a single person will be able to achieve something better. It might still make sense if you treat it as just a hobby project, though. > or XBMC device or MP3 player with one of their boards. That seems rather easily achievable. The resulting device is just not going to be as compact as a consumer one. > Does anyone here have any thoughts about that? I hope you'll find some of what I wrote useful :) Wojtek
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