I’m a free software activist and just received my second batch Fairphone.
Basically, I believe the “fair” solution as regards to software is that we should always have the right to run, study, modify and redistribute any software we use - which is rather a prerequisite for “owning” it, so having 100% free software is very much in the Fairphone’s spirit.
At first I thought this was already the case, as the legal information in “About this phone” only includes “Open Source Licenses”.
However, the phone seems to include proprietary firmware (maybe inevitable at this point) and some of the apps seem not to be free software. How do I find out exactly which apps are covered by the “open source licenses” and which are not? I’d like to delete all the latter and only keep the former. And then I very much hope that future versions of the Fairphone will build on 100% free software. The “End-User License for Fairphone OS” (https://fairphone.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201359553) is not just not free or “Open Source”, it’s actually quite unacceptable for anyone with an interest in free software.
The best case scenario would be that each app is open source, its source code is easily available, there is no proprietary firmware because all hardware has open specifcations, and the EULA on the URL above should state that you, the user, is always allowed to use, study, change and redistribute the software as you want.
This should be the out-of-the-box experience of an actually “Fair” device. If people want to install proprietary packages as e.g. the Google apps on top of this, they’ll of course be free to do so.
And in order not to sound too negative, I’ll add that the Fairphone is a step forward compared to other Android devices. It comes rooted, and you’re not required to have a Google account to use it. That’s really worth a lot! As I want the project to succeed, I’d also like it to give complete software freedom out of the box, as that’s actually the only fair way to deal in software. Fairphone should not settle for anything less.