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Ubuntu Phone Isn't Important Enough To Demand an Open Source Baseband
colinneagle (2544914) writes "Canonical is producing a version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution specifically for smartphones, but Richard Tynan, writing for PrivacyInternational.org, recently pointed out that the baseband in Ubuntu-powered phones will remain proprietary. ... Some have criticized Canonical for missing an opportunity to push for a fully Open Source smartphone, but in order to fix this problem (and open up the code for this super-critical bit of software), we need companies that have a large amount of clout, in the smartphone market, to make it a priority. Canonical (with Ubuntu) just doesn't have that clout yet. They're just now dipping their toes into the smartphone waters. But you know who does have that clout? Google.
Google has made a point of touting Open Source (at least sometimes), and they are the undisputed king of the smartphone operating system world. And yet I hear no big moves by Google to encourage phone manufacturers to utilize Open Source baseband firmware, such as OsmocomBB. So has Canonical missed an opportunity? No. Not yet. If (some may say 'when') Ubuntu gains a critical amount of market share in the phone world, that will be their chance to pressure manufacturers to produce a truly Open Source phone. Until then, Canonical needs to continue to work within the world we have today."
Google has made a point of touting Open Source (at least sometimes), and they are the undisputed king of the smartphone operating system world. And yet I hear no big moves by Google to encourage phone manufacturers to utilize Open Source baseband firmware, such as OsmocomBB. So has Canonical missed an opportunity? No. Not yet. If (some may say 'when') Ubuntu gains a critical amount of market share in the phone world, that will be their chance to pressure manufacturers to produce a truly Open Source phone. Until then, Canonical needs to continue to work within the world we have today."
Such naivety. Ubuntu never even gained a significant amount of market share in the regular desktop/laptop world. Google, which supposedly uses its own spin of Ubuntu internally, recently released Google Now for Windows and Mac but didn't bother with Linux. The Google Drive client has been out for Windows and Mac for ages and yet a client for Linux is "still in development".
The only people who think it's a case of 'when' Ubuntu gains a critical amount of market share in the phone world are fanboys and kids who are still too idealistic and don't want to face the mountain of evidence which suggests Canonical don't know how to make something make money. They still haven't even turned a profit in close to 10 years for fucks sake! I'm sorry if this sounds like trolling but I'm sick and tired of Linux fans having their heads in the clouds and not being down to earth like I was expecting them to be.
The only thing google likes about open source is the cost, and the geek cred, everything else they hate, and will actively try to remove.
Google, these days, is interested in making as much of the Android ecosystem closed source as possible in order to exert control over it and manufacturers. So I don't see them wanting to open source something important like the baseband firmware. Source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...
Patents.
Ain't never gonna happen.
Dreames. Nothing but dreamers.
Mint probably cares about Ubuntu, since it's a fork. Or was that supposed to be funny?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
How can an Ubuntu phone be taken serious when Touch is horribly buggy and hardly runs on anything. I tested it on my Nexus 7 and it was basically unusable it doesn't even have a working memory management. I would probable have better luck with Haiku. O well back to CM, at least it works and has a cool animation at startup. Which is all that matters if you want to look cooler and nerdier that the other guy reading his tablet on the toilet.
What part of you thinks a company with half a clue is going to 'open up' their special magic so that companies like Huawei can rape them in the process?
NO smartphone maker gives enough of a shit about Ubuntu for them to have ANY chance at ALL of opening the baseband.
You guys live in a really silly fantasy world where people seem to hurt themselves to benefit you, that doesn't actually happen and you have provided absolutely no reason they should actually open the baseband. You're a statistically insignificant group of people demanding something silly that no one else on the planet gives a shit about because you think no one else's way is possibly acceptable, you're way or the high way ...
Theres no compelling reason for any one to open their baseband.
Demanding OSS firmware is fucking silly anyway, the chips aren't open, you can't actually see whats going on in them and you never will because again, theres NO REASON to compel them to do so.
Your monitor/display ... not OSS. Your computer hardware ... not OSS pretty much the only OSS in your life is the tiny little bit you run on your desktop, which is itself in no way what so ever open ...
You guys pick some random silly shit to rant about and miss far bigger issues. It really makes you look silly and unaware of what you're talking about when you rant on about OSS baseband on a proprietary chip.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Since Mint has solidly dethroned it, who cares about Ubuntu?
Next time, don't link to a page that debunks your own argument.
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Open source basebands cannot, legally, in most parts of the world be up-datable by the user, which removes most of the interest.
There are several good reasons for this.
Radio is a shared resource. Cellphones only work as well as they do as the towers arrange it so that no cellphone is transmitting on top of another one.
The modem hardware is quite capable in most cases of transmitting right over the top of other transmissions. The worst case would be a free app turning up that gave free data transfer between nearby phones. And did this by ignoring the towers, and going direct.
This has the potential to knock off dozens of calls from the network per user, some of which may be emergency calls.
FCC/... approvals are inherently with a given software version of the modem - most of the behaviour of the modem is set by software - and changing that software without approval will void the approval of the phone.
In some countries, there is actual specific legislation.
If your open-source baseband could change the IMEI, then once you have been informed that this has been done, you are actually committing an offence if you continue to sell the phone which enables the user to do this in the UK.
Most of it's probably regulatory issues. Anything that transmits radio has to be set up so it can't go outside the FCC-set limits (eg. stays within maximum allowable power for a given channel, stays only on assigned channels, etc. etc.). That used to be handled in hardware, but these days it's cheaper to use generic hardware that'll transmit at any power on any channel and then impose the limitations within the baseband code. And it's cheaper to allow updating of the baseband than it is to replace phones to fix problems in the baseband code. That combination means that open-source baseband would allow you to re-flash a baseband that'd go outside regulatory limits, which'd be a no-no. Combine with a legal environment where the phone manufacturer, not the consumer, would be the one sued (because they've got deep pockets and the consumers don't) and you can see why we have the situation we have.
open source baseband just isn't going to happen - at least not for anything that could be considered a "modern" network standard. The levels of complexity for 4G baseband and the like are in another universe when compared to anything currently in the open source world - and they change at a staggering rate.
A phone from Canonical? This is the company who brings us the buggiest linux distribution in history, the company whose own forums got hacked and were down for two weeks while they tried to restore a backup. They have never made money and are completely dependent on the continued financial support of their self appointed benevolent dictator for life. With tens of millions in personal losses so far, and years past his own deadline for Canonical to break even, do you really trust that they will be around? I hear all the time that Ubuntu is good for linux. I suppose it is, the same way that factory farming is good for chickens.
I am very sorry but we will not give you access to the radio.
There is too much non-public functionality in a cell phone's
radio that would wind up not being implemented or even deliberately
exploited in a way that is damaging to the intended purposes of
a cell phone.
Sorry, but you will need to use Qualcomm's Advanced Mobile Subscriber
Software (AMSS) or similar offerings that implements the entire
cell phone feature-set both public and non-public.
Now go back and debate Android vs. Ubuntu's finer points on the application
core of your phone and forget about what the radio core is doing on your phone
right now in this moment.
If the open source baseband was even remotely feasible to do, open projects like Openmoko, OpenPhoenux (GTA04, Neo900) together with OsmocomBB would already come up with 100% open GSM device. The people working on those project dream to be able to do that, but they simply can't. OsmocomBB is practically a research project, as there are no practical use-cases for it to "normal user" (in most countries it's illegal to use modem with OsmocomBB on it unless you're operating it with your own BTS-lab network you got permission to set up for development or research purposes), and it only operates on very old devices with TI Calypso, as basically all of more modern basebands are cryptographically signed (TI Calypso was also supposed to be, but for some unknown reason that feature was disabled, probably due to misconfiguration at the factory - this is the only reason OsmocomBB was possible at all).
Unless we do lots of legal lobbying and raise much more resources than a company like Canonical has (trust me, building proper 4G modem is awfully hard and expensive. You have to comply to several thousands pages of protocol documentation and pass many certifications. Canonical probably could would be able to afford producing Ubuntu Edge, but they certainly won't be able to afford the modem development), it's much more helpful to look at projects like Neo900 ( http://neo900.org/ ) which aim for the best possible separation between APE and the baseband with built-in monitoring in case you suspect modem might be doing something malicious. In my opinion, this is the proper step forward the truly free mobile devices in our pockets, not shouting and demanding open basebands (even if we all, including Neo900 developers, dream about them).
Since when did Ubuntu care about being 100% open-source? As I recall, Ubuntu gained share early on because it was one of the few which said "Closed source video blobs? No Problem!".
Why would phones be any different? Why would Ubuntu care if the baseband code is proprietary but it worked? None of this has seemed to matter for Ubuntu ever, so why does this summary suggest they will ever care?
Yup, you nailed it
Google and open source? Hmm...
How about an open source Hangouts client to begin with? Or at least a protocol spec so that I can write my own?
Even if Samsung (the biggest phone maker in the world) decided it wanted open source baseband for its phones, it wouldn't happen.
It wont happen because of:
1.NDAs and secret stuff. (last I checked, protocols like GSM still contain stuff you cant officially get without NDAs, also the makers of the cellular radio hardware would never give away the secrets of their cellular radio hardware to their competitors)
2.Patents (with all the patents applying to cellular technology, any source that was made available would be examined by an army of patent lawyers looking for violations, also some of the license agreements tied to cellular standards probably specifically prohibit sharing source with anyone who hasn't also signed a patent agreement)
3.Carriers (no carrier is going to want a baseband that could be changed because it could be changed in ways that harm their networks (maybe not intentionally but it could still happen)
4.Regulations (FCC and other regulators have strict rules about how cellphones are allowed to operate and I doubt they would allow a phone with an open source baseband to get approval because such a phone could be modified to violate the rules)
The billionaires behind RedHat apparently
Different target users. RedHat's users are willing to fund development and pay for expensive support contracts, Ubuntu's are not.
That's not entirely accurate. The other main version of Mint is called Linux Mint Debian, a Debian variant with a similar look and feel to the Ubuntu-based version, as well as having some enhancements like proper font anti-aliasing out of the box, but still being based on Debian as opposed to Ubuntu. This means that if Canonical goes batshit crazy (or crazier anyway) and makes enough decisions that are counter-productive to the future of the main Linux Mint edition, then the Mint guys can focus entirely on their Debian spin.
Those who hold am amateur radio license would be able to build experiments to develop end-point radios with modulation techniques found in today's modern wireless communications systems. The trouble is that many of the folks in the amateur radio community are not 'pushing' the state of the art in communications technologies. Amateur radio operators have licenses to transmit but many lack the background in signal processing and software design to make it happen. The community as a whole needs amateur operators to embrace these areas and innovate.
As long as baseband has its own isolated memory and can't physically subvert the OS I can live with trusting the baseband as much as I trust the carriers. (e.g. not at all)
Canonical (with Ubuntu) just doesn't have that clout yet
They won't ever, they've got no idea what they're doing.
If (some may say 'when') Ubuntu gains a critical amount of market share
when? Who writes this drivel? "Hey guys, I know I'm 8 YEARS hate to the party and the whole market is overflowing with MASSIVE players, but it's just a matter of time before we gain critical market share!". when? never.
From the point of view of the application processor, the baseband processor and its software can simply be treated as part of the communications infrastructure: closed source and inherently untrustworthy. All that is necessary is that the application processor is sufficiently isolated from the baseband processor. That isolation has been lacking in some phones, but Ubuntu and Firefox phones could easily provide it.
Google doesn't have nearly as much clout with baseband manufacturers as you might think. For most people, the choice isn't between an Android phone and no phone, it's between an Android phone and a different phone, both which will have a baseband. So to the baseband manufacturer, whether their product is running under Android or something else makes very little difference.
I guess is a manufacturer thought having an exclusive lock on Android phones was more profitable than what they are doing now they could go to Google and offer a deal, but since Google has very little control over the handset manufacturers it probably wouldn't have very much clout.
Monstar L
How can an Ubuntu phone be taken serious when Touch is horribly buggy and hardly runs on anything. I tested it on my Nexus 7 and it was basically unusable it doesn't even have a working memory management. I would probable have better luck with Haiku. O well back to CM, at least it works and has a cool animation at startup. Which is all that matters if you want to look cooler and nerdier that the other guy reading his tablet on the toilet.
If I remember right these are, more or less, experiments! There raw, and unfinished. They put the a base out there and want the community to hopefully fix/add/fine tune it.
this should be modded up instead of the moron above.
a) No phone maker has opensourced the baseband ..
.......
.......
b) Ubuntu hasn't opensourced the baseband
c) Therefore Ubuntu Phone isn't important
Open Source only is BS. I want Open Source an Open Hardware. Someone make a Linux based phone that has a processor from Open Cores. I'd buy that!
Mint has Mint Debian Edition as well. My guess is that if Ubuntu were to die tomorrow, Mint would keep living as that incarnation.