Fairphone Open OS roadmap discussion

Well, Android security patches are being released on a monthly basis. And Fairphone seems to have the goal to keep up with that, as @keesj pointed out - and I highly appreciate that! In view of this, I wouldn’t like to recompile every month, in particular facing my weak hardware (need to free 70GB space every time; and syncing sources and compilation takes more than 12h).

3 Likes

If it’s just the patches, recompilation and resync should be pretty quick if you use the compiler cache. But yes, you will need to reserve quite a bunch of disk space to do that.

My point was targeted mainly at people who want to compile their system themselves anyways. Of course, for the majority getting compiled binaries is more preferable.

1 Like

Fair enough. :wink:

Nobody wants to compile anything :slight_smile:

It’s boring and steals time. The pain is that all new features have to be adapted a little for each device and it’s OEM/SoC/bin blob bound source code. And not everything that is useful also ends up automatically in the Android-Code and it takes a while to end up in the OEM code. Also, most paid developers want a more “Apple-like” ecosystem, not so much a “Linux-on-a-phone” Android for security, user-friendliness, and marketing reasons.

1 Like

Is there any information on the release date of the OSOS binary? I don’t want to compile it on my own, but would like to start customizing it, without the thought of doing it all over again a week later.
Could someone who compiled an OSOS without GMS upload there files somewhere?

Not allowed. But maybe someone will ignore the strange licence and send you a private message with a link. The problem is the licence is pretty hard to understand. I’m not even sure if it is forbidden. But there is a discussion about that elsewhere if you search for it.

Update, Links:

I guess these lines are important: “Fairphone grants you (…) non-transferable, limited copyright license to download, install and use the Software for non commercial purposes only on a Fairphone 2 device in machine-readable (i.e., object code) environment”, “You must not take any actions that may result in the fragmentation of Android.” and “You are also not allowed to remove portions of the Software, alter or otherwise modify it, or translate, reproduce, copy, reverse engineer, reverse compile, disassemble or transfer the Software.” But I don’t see a lot about sharing here and the non-transferable is pretty vague. If everyone can download it you are practically sharing it anyway, it just makes things difficult.

But I’m not a lawyer and I guess the same is true for @keesj. There is no lawyer-like official statement yet, I think.

3 Likes

Q1 2016 is almost over. My FP2 is lying stupidly in its delivery box most of the time. What are the release plans/circumstances for the fposos? :rage:

4 Likes

@Eagle5 you have all the rights to be angry/loose patience. I am sure you won’t believe me but we are building the final build for release as we speak.

21 Likes

@keesj Great News! Can you give us more Information? And when do you plan to release it?

Great to hear :), but what about the open pull requests here https://code.fairphone.com/gerrit/#/q/status:open, it feels like Android community support is kept small in favor of alternate OSes? I’m missing some focus and better information flow :-/. Guess you and all team members are really working hard, so I don’t want to sound angry or such ;).

1 Like

So, I am little bit lost, it will be FOSOS or not? I just agree with the idea of having a more secure in the way that I could restrict any application to have internet access. say that, i have previously owned a Xiaomi Mi3, which have very nice secure features (at least from my point of view).
One of them is that the rom came rooted, so I could install a firewall and block all traffic I wanted
Other nice feature is that it allowed the owner to grant or deny access to contacts, sms, camera, etc, for each application.
That is what I call own a phone.

Maybe those features can be implemented without rooting? Using a preinstalled iptables firewall and the option to do allow and deny access for application?

I am not a geek of informatics but it is an idea.

bests

Nope, I think you need root for applying iptable-rules.

Thanks for the support response @anon73900052

Here are my questions:

Dear Fairphone-team,
like some others I am eagerly waiting (with my Phone mostly unused in its box :frowning: ) for the official release of the mentioned FPosOS. Regarding that, I have several questions:

  • Is there a vague release date? (not just Q1-2016)
  • Will a self built FPosOS be in the normal lifecycle (the updater is there - but will it be compatible)?
  • Do you plan to offer a officially supported recovery system (like TWRP, clockwork)?
  • Would it be possible to release a developer blog to always see the current state the FPosOS is in?
    – regarding that… I would love to see some nasty bugs that were smashed… that could be very educating. :slight_smile:
  • Am I free to publish the answers in the community forum?
    Thanks for your time and kind regards,Frank

I got the following response:

Dear Frank,

Thanks for your message. As you’ve seen, the
Fairphone 2 was shipped with Android™ 5.1 (Lollipop) operating system
(OS) with Google apps pre-installed. The OS has a special look and feel developed together with Kwamecorp, as well as a few custom Apps and features for an improved user experience.

Our goal is to take a more open source approach
to be able to offer owners more choice and control over their phone’s
OS. At the start of the development of Fairphone 2, one of the major
ambitions for the phone was to make the Fairphone 2 hardware an open
development platform.

So in essence:

We built a website as a starting point for learning more about our open source activities
and how you can be a part of it. There you can download the source
code, drivers and get information on how to build the Fairphone Open
Source OS—the open source version of the Fairphone 2 operating system.Advanced
users will be pleased to know the phone comes with the industry
standard OEM unlock feature allowing you more control over device.Finally,
what we wanted to achieve is to enable the organizations and the
communities who develop various operating systems and flavors to use the
Fairphone 2 hardware as a development platform, on which they could
develop and release their work. This is something that a large
proportion of our community has been very interested in for some time,
and we are proud to finally get this off the ground. For more info on
this, read this blog we recently published.You
should ask all your questions and put your comment on the forum, were
you will receive more acurrate information from our software team. The
release of the Open Source Software should not be long now. It is a
matter of weeks, I think.

If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch again!

Greetings from Amsterdam,


That is me getting in touch. Only one of my questions was answered: the roughly estimated ETA of the fposos. :frowning:
I am fully aware of the open source code project and the sailfish OS port (and happy about the effort done there). But my other questions are still there. (Recovery partition, deployment, update lifecycle, etc. ) Please @keesj shed some light on this (and how the compilation went).

As a sidenode: I find it quite confusing being redirected to the community forum where I was told to ask my questions to the support, because this is the community forum. :stuck_out_tongue: I appreciate, that you guys are here.

Edit: In the answer were several links… Maybe someone overlooked one, so I will append them here…
features
kwamecorp
OSS approach
fposos code
recently blogged

1 Like

Haha, sweet, @Eagle5 ! It seems that @keesj already answered most of your questions before and our software team is doing its best to release this wonderful software version as soon as they can. Because they love and believe in what they do! As we all do here in this community and at this office.

Still a little bit more of patience and you will SEE all the answer to your questions.

Peace. X

2 Likes

Sylvian, thank you very much for your reply here. And also thank you for taking one for the team.

I wish that sometimes the support team would take a step back and re-read the team’s answers and the communities questions to see if there is a pattern in the questions and answers that is not always matching up.

The pattern that I most often see: People ask new highly detailed questions that were not asked before and get a very friendly, but also very empty answer. This is totally understandable. Your workload is high and the people that could answer highly detailed questions are busy fixing those questions/the code.

But some infrastructure changes like a bug tracker or a blog could show people with “detailed info needs” the current showstoppers very quickly. All that would be needed would be a bit more openness on the bug/code tracking side.

Tools like redmine together with gerrit could provide such a framework. More active users could even use those to point out the issues to others. And a developer blog could show things like success stories or notes if you have to wait for other parties (“Code is being reviewed at google, keep your fingers crossed”, "We reported a possible bug in the QC code and are waiting for feedback from them …).

I think @Eagle5 was talking about something along this lines and this was not answered by @keesj before.

6 Likes

Hi @keesj
As the update to FP GMS is out now, any news about

?
Thanks
Klaus

5 Likes

Yesterday on twitter they said that FP2 OSOS was “imminent”…
The policy of announcing a date for a release reminds me of little me when my mother would ask me when I would tidy up my room, though I didn’t exactly use the word “imminent”, I guess.

9 Likes

When in Star Trek a core breach was imminent, everyone ran as hell… :smile:

I don’t understand what the matter is with not given any clearer information. I mean it wouldn’t have been more complicated to write something like:

Our Dev-Team is working hard to release the fposos version. We hope to manage a release this week but can’t be sure because of that nasty bug.

I mean, this is a very mature community, everyone would understand that such things happen in complex software development and appreciate the communication.

3 Likes

If Scotty was in charge of the OSOS…

“Scotty, how long does it take until we have the OSOS?”
“I need like 14 days”
“I can only give you a week”
“Ok, then I’ll finish it by tomorrow.”

2 Likes

it is still android :wink: