“partner with FairPhone”, says Gaël Duval (he is the guy behind Mandrake), here:
It is all about eelo, a fork of LineageOS:
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Sounds like an interesting project.
Only one thing: They keep talking about “Open Source”. If you don’t at least through a “free” in there then I don’t really trust you from the beginning.
Oh and:
The full quote is:
preceding paragraph
Still, we will face one dark zone: low-level proprietary hardware drivers on smartphones. They are driving the camera, the GPS, various sensors… Hardware vendors do not provide source code for these drivers. And they are extremely difficult to rewrite unless doing some heavy and resource-consuming reverse-engineering. And of course, some of those “black box” drivers could possibly leak users’ private data.
Future options for eelo to address this issue will be to:
- partner with FairPhone or similar 100% open hardware projects
which is clearly wrong (unfortunately).
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Confusing title. Quoting original blog post:
Future options for eelo to address this issue will be to:
- partner with FairPhone or similar 100% open hardware projects
(emphasis by me)
So nothing talked with them, and reading that bullet point, nothing analysed at all. Starting with the fact that Fairphone is not a 100% open hardware project, and probably wouldn’t be in a long timeframe (read this other thread for more info).
Ok, assuming that Fairphone and this Mandrake developer will make contact in the future and they’d be all ok and happy. Using Yalp in a stock OS? Violates Google’s terms and conditions. And most of the proyects it mentions, including microG itself (GCM, Google Device ID, etc).
But more importantly: he is tired of walled gardens, but in practice he wants to turn Android into iOS and offer cloud alternatives to actual cloud walled gardens, which creates mooore walled gardens and doesn’t offer any technical trust.
In my opinion —not trying to critizise— that’s just a early-days post on hacky ideas about tech freedom. Not scalable at all, but a good starting point. However, I wouldn’t bet my money yet like I did on the Purism Librem 5.
[details=Spam: Purism comparison]Purism Librem 5 has:
- a quality background: Librem laptops, a FSF-guaranteed libre operating system
- more oportunities to success: stablished market, privacy- and security-minded people, a brand reputation
- better community: the GNU FLOSS one —built from the beginning from OSS ideals— they work with upstream proyects, give back to the community
Also, Lineage OS and LOS for microG will surely be ported (remember, 100% libre software from the ground-up)[/details]
PS: Damn, @paulakreuzer! You were faster! Same quote, 
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Correct, I should have quoted like you did. Thanks.
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So basically a LineageOS fork with a logo the Google legal department will make short work of when they feel bored (almost Google “G” upside-down in almost Google colours)?
I’m in for positive surprises, but I don’t hold my breath.
Apart from that I don’t feel fragmentation of effort is the best way to solutions for privacy-aware users. Put all possible weight behind making things better that are already on the road.
But perhaps starters of Linux distros nowadays don’t know a different way than to fragment effort 
.
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