postmarketOS's blog post: "Non-free firmware is installed by default"

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Staircase
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Joined: 02/24/2022

This blog post is a-few-month old. I am posting it here in case people search for discussions about the free state of postmarketOS on this forum.

PS I got interested in pmOS after I heard of a web-server running on a repurposed 'smartphone' running pmOS powered by a repurposed solar panel.

https://postmarketos.org/edge/2024/02/15/default-nonfree-fw/

From pmOS's blog:

February 15, 2024 1 min. read

Traditionally we've tried to give users an option to opt out of installing proprietary, non-free firmware when building images with pmbootstrap. Recent changes to pmbootstrap have disabled this mechanism, so now non-free firmware is always installed if it's needed to support functionality on a given device. All pre-built postmarketOS images have always included non-free firmware.

The mechanism behind this option was hard to maintain, not well tested, and sometimes builds would end up having non-free firmware installed anyway. It forced us to do weird tricks in APKBUILDs, sometimes causing firmware to be accidentally removed from devices. This has caused some really annoying regressions for folks, and is likely to be a reliable source of similar trouble in the future.

In an ideal world, hardware would work without the need to load proprietary non-free firmware. Unfortunately, we live in a world where this is increasingly not true. Many bootloaders load a lot of non-free firmware on boot that users cannot replace or ignore. Many chips, such as the GPU, WiFi, Bluetooth, modem, video decoding, etc. in your devices require proprietary firmware before they'll even function at all. Some modern devices can't even be charged without loading proprietary firmware - the battery will literally drain away while it is plugged in if this firmware is not loaded!

For the vast majority of cases none of this proprietary, non-free firmware gets executed on the main processor, it will only be loaded into secondary processors and run there. Most devices have strong memory separation so a rogue firmware shouldn't be able to take over the system.

We understand this situation is far from ideal, but after much thought we felt it was more important to stop spending time on this barely working, not well tested feature, and instead strive to bring free software to more people and create a distro that works "out of the box" on as many devices as possible.

strypey
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Joined: 05/14/2015

Staircase:
> I am posting it here in case people search for discussions about the free state of postmarketOS on this forum.

Thanks. Do you know what implications (if any) this has for people using pmOS on a PinePhone?

Staircase
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Joined: 02/24/2022

Sorry. I don't.

I would look there https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Community for a channel where to ask this question.

Avron

I am a translator!

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Joined: 08/18/2020

Thanks for the information.

For people interested in minimizing the amount of non-free software while keeping a fully functional android phone, DivestOS is the best choice that I am aware of. It also supports a number of phones for which LineageOS does not provide support anymore.

iShareFreedom
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Joined: 12/20/2021

There is no Android-based distribution that is free software, except Replicant. https://replicant.us/

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

Does Replicant have a release that's newer than the 6.0 0004 that's promoted on their site? Because that one is nearly 3 years old now.

Dolphinana
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Joined: 03/02/2022

There's no release that's newer than the 6.0 0004 release yet. It will take a while until the new major release comes out.