Chief Replicant Dev On Building a Truly Free Android

angry tapir writes "While Android is open source, it won't work on a phone without software that generally isn't open source. The Replicant project is an attempt to build a version of Android that doesn't rely on binary blobs for which the source code isn't available to end users, and the software currently works on a handful of handsets. I caught up with the project's lead developer to talk about their efforts to make a completely open source version of Android."

Comments

Re:Say goodbye to most coprocessors.

[itsenrique]

If you read the article it goes into detail about said issue. Basically, the project will not itself distribute any non-free materials, but you can load your own (and people do, it seems, for full functionality). So for example you may have to use the binary blob to get your WiFi working on your phone. I wouldn't be so dismissive about the possibility of drivers being developed for certain handsets that are fully open sourced, via some stab at reverse engineering. Now as far as quality....

Wrong focus

[pr0nbot]

While all the attempts to work around proprietary obstacles (rooting, homebrew, emulation etc) undoubtedly have their merits and utility, I think the real focus ought to be on getting hold of open, documented, standards-based, royalty-free hardware.

Maybe it's a pipe dream, but thousands of man-hours will be spunked off trying to reverse engineer radio chipsets or whatever, which could more fruitfully be spent writing or improving software.

I appreciate that folks are free to spend their time however they like, pursuing whatever floats their boat, that's not the point I'm making. Just that getting one vendor to make one decent fully-open handset would represent such a huge step forwards compared to coercing stuff to half run on the handset of some company whose goals are diametrically opposed to yours.

Re:Say goodbye to most coprocessors.

[NuShrike]

Ah, young idealism, trying to be the Debian. I was there, once. It is true that it's better to have open-source drivers, but you need a stable, open, documented hardware platform. PCs are, Android is neither.

You will spend your entire life rebuilding "plumbing" after which the hardware you've built it for is long dead while its descendents -- you cannot support. A life where you didn't actually build anything useful, the next iPhone nor next game-changing piece of software-engineering, but just ran in a mouse-wheel.

Reality is we just have to bend-over a little and suck up buying new hardware; accept the respective new binary blobs. Just try to stay above it. CyanogenMod is doing a good job there.

Re:Say goodbye to most coprocessors.

[oakgrove]

I've had some reversed engineered drivers in Linux that stomped the closed source Windows counterparts. A USB cellular data dongle I got from Verizon years ago took over a minute to connect in windows and would disconnect constantly. In Linux with the free driver it connected in about 5 seconds and never disconnected unless I explicitly told it to. I'm sure there's more to it than just the driver itself but just because something is a reverse engineered piece of code doesn't mean it's going to be worse especially if the OEM intentionally puts some bullshit in their drivers to please their real customers, e.g., Verizon et al.