I think it’s important to have boundaries. If we keep our operating systems fully free, it will be harder for anyone to pressure us to add proprietary components to them. But if our OSes already contain non-free components, it’s not that hard to add more. We not only want freedom, we also want to keep it.

It also needs to be clear for the people in our community that our main goal is freedom and getting rid of proprietary software. Convenience is less important.

I didn’t say that I’m never going to install any firmware updates. I just don’t want to put it in my system if it’s proprietary.

The world won’t change itself. If people did nothing 40 years ago, there wouldn’t be a Free Software movement.

It sounds like you are not using a fully free distro anyway. Most of the popular distros contain proprietary firmware, so what’s the problem?

I am forced to keep proprietary firmware in my OS to use the hardware and that’s what you are advocating for. You want everyone to be forced to do that. But I don’t want anything proprietary in my system. I see no reason why I should have a proprietary firmware package installed for my GPU to work. The firmware could be just on the device itself and if someone wants to change it, then they can install the package in their OS. But maybe there could also be some other way.

You don’t know what the proprietary update contains. It can be a security fix, but also a backdoor. People can decide on their own if they want to update, but I see no reason why I must be forced to have proprietary stuff in my system. I want a fully libre distro. I can’t switch to one, because I would have to give up on using AMD GPUs, because people like you say that this is fine.

But nobody is saying that there shouldn’t be a way to update firmware. Firmware just shouldn’t a be part of the OS, unless it’s free. Adding proprietary components to our systems will only make it harder for us to keep our freedom.

The FSF’s stance is just based on our current capabilities. Most people still use proprietary operating systems. We are capable of developing free alternatives of non-free programs, even very complicated ones. But it’s not realistic to think that we can currently replace all firmware for any device if we don’t know how it works. The amount of products that have the RYF certificate is already very small. Even Librem 5 didn’t manage to get it. When it becomes easier, I’m sure they will change the requirements or add more levels.

I’m pretty sure Libreboot contains proprietary firmware now and GNU is planning to develop an actually libre fork. So it’s silly for the developer to criticize the FSF for not being radical enough. It makes me think that the person doesn’t really believe in what they are saying.

But then the author says they want us to have proprietary firmware packages in our systems. So they want our OSes to be less libre… They even compare not including proprietary firmware to burning books… I stopped reading after that.

I’ve read it, but I don’t really understand the legal issue. I’m also not sure what could be illegal about VSCodium. It uses the Open VSX store for downloading extensions (but not every extension is on there).

It would certainly be better if VSCode was under a Copyleft license, so that it couldn’t be turned into proprietary software and maybe that way addons would also have to be Free Software, like in Blender. But Microsoft clearly doesn’t want that.

I’m not much against having repositories with plugins, extensions or whatever BUT they should be like Debian, you can just pack everything into images / a folder and use offline for ever when required.

Yeah, that’s a good idea. They could also just be added to Debian, which would solve this problem, but there also would be another benefit for me. Most people don’t care about that, but I want to only use Free Software. When I install something from Debian’s free repository, I don’t have to worry that it might be proprietary, because they only allow Free Software there. I don’t have this certainty when installing software from most other places.

Same goes for modern Docker powered solutions and JavaScript frameworks.

Some JavaScript frameworks and libraries seem to be packaged in Debian. But most people use NPM, of course.

Free Software gives you the 4 essential freedoms. One of them is the freedom to distribute the program. So anyone could legally give you a copy for free. Sounds like what you want, no?

Even if the authors implement some kind of DRM, any programmer can modify the program to remove that feature and share the modified version with everyone. Technically that is also possible with non-free software, but it’s illegal, pretty difficult and requires special skills.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

We’ve had a way forward for 40 years and it’s called Free Software: https://youtu.be/Ag1AKIl_2GM

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

It’s super weird to me that pirates aren’t advocating for the Free Software movement. Being able to control their own devices should be like one of their main goals.

Ah, true. I didn’t know about Grayjay, though. It doesn’t seem to mention this on their website or GitLab, but I can see that the license is proprietary. Ok, their license does use the words “open source”. You are not even allowed to edit the code! Crazy and a huge shame for something coming from people in the right to repair movement. Software freedom should be one of their goals. But I guess they think you should be able to control hardware, but not software.

Speaking about VSCode it is also open-source until you realize that 1) the language plugins that you require can only compiled and run in official builds of VSCode and 2) Microsoft took over a lot of the popular 3rd party language plugins, repackage them with a different license… making it so if you try to create a fork of VSCode you can’t have any support for any programming language because it won’t be an official VSCode build. MS be like :).

I’m opposed to having repositories for plugins. I don’t want my code editor to connect to the internet at all. If I need some popular plugin, it should already be available in the repository of the distro that I’m using. Some distributions of VIM and Emacs download a bunch of plugins on launch from who knows where. I don’t get why people are fine with that.

It’s similar with Flatpak and Snap. Oh and each programming language has its own package manager too, of course (NPM belongs to Microsoft too, btw). Everyone and everything wants its own package manager or a separate distribution system.

For now I use VSCodium in firejail to prevent it from accessing the network and I don’t install new plugins. I haven’t heard of any better editor, unfortunately.

Thought so! I guess people just assume that whenever they see something on GitHub.

I definitely am eyeing a Linux phone but I don’t think I’ll buy one until a lot of the bugs are worked out on the next model, maybe the Pinephone Pro v2 or whatever the next one is.

Keep in mind that when it comes out, it’s probably gonna take at least 1-2 years for it to be good. PinePhone Pro has been around for 1-2 years it seems and I assume it’s pretty usable now. I’m not up to date on latest development, though. It’s kind of a weird thing, because a few months of progress can make a big difference - something you saw a few months ago might be outdated now (if you use latest software - but things like Mobian Stable will stay the same). But overall it’s a slow process.

Right now I just use stock android with all Fdroid apps, nothing proprietary at least as far as apps go. And with Rethink DNS/firewall it pretty much blocks 100% of Google’s telemetry. Seems to be a happy medium before I can switch to an alternate like graphene, e/os or preferably a better hardware linux phone.

That sounds pretty good compared to what most people do! There are also phones that run Ubuntu Touch, which uses an Android kernel I think. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than Graphene, though.

Oh, I see, but I’m guessing you can’t use normal Debian on it? https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Quartz64_Software_Releases

If you are still interested, I have the original PinePhone. I’ve been using it as my only phone for around 2 years. It’s slow (I think the hardware is from 2010?) and not very good in general, but I don’t want to use a proprietary operating system, so I’m stuck with it.

PinePhone Pro is way faster, has better cameras, but it’s still not gonna be as fast as a modern phone (I think it uses 2016 hardware?). It has worse batter life than the original PinePhone, unless you add some proprietary firmware (https://xnux.eu/log/083.html - note that this is an old post) - then it’s supposed to be similar to the original. The original PinePhone lasts a day if you don’t use it much. If you use it, it will probably only last a few hours. If you buy the keyboard case with builtin battery, it will have 3x as much power, but the case is very thick (https://web.archive.org/web/20230523083341/https://phal.io/tech/pinephone-keyboard-review). But there is at least one other extended battery case that you can buy or 3D print.

A true Linux phone that can be flashed with Mobian (mobile Debian) or any other Linux distro.

PinePhones need custom kernel patches. For PinePhone Pro a lot of them have been upstreamed to the Linux kernel, but if you want everything to work, it might still require a custom kernel. So I’m not sure what experience you will get out of a normal distro (I suspect some things might not work). But you can install Mobian, postmarketOS, Manjaro ARM and more. Those are the mobile distros that most people use.

Note that Mobian has 2 proprietary firmware packages (https://packages.mobian.org), so technically it’s not a fully free distro. They are probably necessary for WiFi and Bluetooth to work. I don’t know how free other distros are, but I doubt that the other ones that I’ve mentioned are any better.

possible dead development of Mobian

Pine64 only develops the hardware and all software is developed by the community or Purism (the company that makes Librem 5). Mobian isn’t dying, the problem is with the kernel for the original PinePhone (which is maintained only by the community). But there is nothing to worry about for the PinePhone Pro according to Mobian devs: https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/

good gps navigation

I don’t use it much, but last I checked mine, it was off by around 1km. PinePhone Pro uses the same modem, so I don’t know if it’s better. But maybe things got better if you use newer versions of software.

I think if you buy it, it should be with the expectation that you are buying a toy to play around with. Because it’s hard to say if it will work out for you. I’ve heard that PinePhone Pro has issues with call audio quality. In my PinePhone, modem sometimes doesn’t wake up from suspend, so I have a script to reset it. So sometimes you will have to use workarounds to improve things. If you don’t use a stable distro, some things might also break from time to time.

Also, the modem runs proprietary firmware, which has some vulnerability that can be exploited locally. There is a libre replacement for one of those parts of the firmware (the rest will still be proprietary), but it’s not shipped with the phone, so you will have to flash it yourself: https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk

Software is another topic. You probably won’t be able to use Signal for example (requires an Android app), unless you use Waydroid, which lets you run Android apps.

For instance, why is this community modded by me? You would of though that they would of monitored the state of Reddit and jumped on board Lemmy. Its things like these that show that the fsf is blind.

First of all, thanks for doing this. Some months ago when I searched for a community like this, I couldn’t find anything. I’m not sure that the FSF can do much more, though.

Richard Stallman still travels the world to give talks about Free Software in multiple languages. They have a conference called Libre Planet. I wish there were more of Richard’s talks on YouTube, but other than that I don’t know what else they could do that would matter.

It’s just very hard to reach people with such a complicated message. I think that’s why a lot more people have heard of the term Open Source than Free Software. Even on Lemmy most discussions are about “Open Source” and “Linux”. When I commented on some proprietary app being made for Lemmy saying that it was unethical, people downvoted me. They don’t understand when I say that users deserve rights and they think Free Software just means you want to get something for free (I don’t think it even has anything to do with the word “free”, btw - they often think the same way about “Open Source”).

It’s a very complicated topic to explain to an average person, even to developers (many Free Software projects have a Discord server or use other proprietary software). We still should try whenever we can, but this should really be taught at schools. I doubt the FSF can suddenly become much better at this, no matter what they do. If you think there is a gap, we could try to fill it ourselves (and maybe we should), but we probably aren’t gonna build a big audience either.

Also, I just remembered there were some talks about promoting Free Software in last Libre Planet: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/questions-are-the-answer-how-to-have-deeper-conversations-with-anyone-about-free-software-philosophy/

It glosses over the issue of microcode at the expense of security which ultimately affects privacy.

I’m pretty sure the FSF doesn’t say that you shouldn’t be allowed to update/changed the firmware. They just say it shouldn’t be a part of the operating system. The OS needs to be entirely libre with no compromises.

It would be smarter to focus on arm and risc-v as many of those chips are compatible with free software in some way while being highly efficient and portable.

Most devices with those chips require a custom kernel and most likely proprietary firmware (at least for WiFi and Bluetooth). I don’t think you can install an official Debian build from debian.org on a Raspberry PI for example (on RPI 4 you could by using some custom BIOS, but I’m not sure if everything will work then - https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi4). Almost nobody talks about this, though. I have a PinePhone and it runs a custom kernel maintained by the community and its future is uncertain (https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2023/09/30/paperweight-dilemma/). In PinePhone Pro at lot of the patches to the Linux kernel have been upstreamed, but some things are still missing. Librem 5 developers tried to get a RYF certificate, but I’m not sure what happened there. So those kinds of devices can’t save us right now.