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LibrePhone

Phones and Your Freedom

Everyone deserves a computing environment that respects their freedom, from the apps they use on a daily basis down to the most basic components of the system. As "mobile phone" is just another word for a computer in your pocket, we must insist on having the freedom to study, modify, copy, and share every program running on that system.

For a variety of reasons, the progress of mobile phone freedom has lagged behind "personal" computers like desktops and laptops. While it is possible to run a fully free distribution of Android called Replicant, doing so means sacrificing critical functionality: placing calls, taking photos, and connecting to the internet. Librephone is the FSF's project to close this "last gap" in the stack, reverse-engineering the necessary system components to bring cell phones into the free world.

Free software

For a program to be free, the program's user must have four essential freedoms. As the Free Software Definition puts it:

  • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).

  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).

  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Users should not have to "compromise" their freedom just to have some functionality. While there are a number of different Android distributions available, virtually all of them ship with nonfree software. How things got this way is understandable, but we need to go further. Having software freedom is vital to having in the digital age.

In the meantime

While we're working as hard as we can to limit Librephone's scope to one or two devices that need the least amount of work to be fully free, reverse-engineering the blobs on even one of these devices is an enormous task.

If you haven't already, you can already take important steps to respect your freedom and regain control from unethical corporations like Apple, Google, and Microsoft: