Replacement for closed hardware in the horizon?

Discuss The Products
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Hi,
Anyone knows if there are plans to provide hardware without closed software in the short term? I mean, for example, a daughterboard with free software.
It will be great to be able to have such replacements.

Thanks!

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I think this is very unlikely and beyond control of the FP developers. The main reasons are political: Various governments attempt to gain control over wireless communication devices: https://fsfe.org/activities/radiodirective/index.en.html
And it’s not just the EU, the US FCC follows the same strategy and I do not think that a Brexit Britain will be a haven for free software and free speech.
As far as I know there is/was only one family of Motorola feature = non-smart phones that uses the so called “Calypso” chipset that is able to run open source baseband (radio processor) software: https://osmocom.org/projects/baseband/

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I see, thanks for the response. I was thinking that maybe some independent developer might comply with e.g. Calypso and FP just leave the hardware open for replacement as it is now. I have no clue, you see that also unfeasible?
Thanks!

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Here is some more information about calypso: https://www.freecalypso.org
You see that the chips are no longer manufactured and another important detail is that these chips only work on GSM - that means no 3/4G, high speed data and so on.
So unfortunately all this looks very unlikely. Currently I can only see three options that could potentially provide open firmware:

  • A chip manufacturer releasing a chip with open sourced baseband firmware. This is very unlikely because they are after markets, and the markets are regulated by exactly those governments that want control.
  • Reverse engineering: Because it is illegal it won’t end up on the market.
  • A leak of firmware source code: Again illegal and thus of no commercial use.

Looking at this situation I think it is much better to put effort in the development of free and open source operating systems that provide safeguards against corporate or governmental abuse of our phones / data.

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Thanks for the clear response. I still hope some manufacturer finds that there’s a market for open basebands, maybe I’m unrealistic.
I can see that in the end free OS withouth free baseband and (somehow) private mobile triangulation, either states or corporations will have our privacy. It’s a lot and for sure nowadays the only way of protecting your privacy is not having a mobile phone…