Librephone project wants to remove proprietary “blobs” from smartphones that otherwise run open source software

There are plenty of smartphone operating systems that are mostly made from free and open source software, including de-Googled versions of Android like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and e/OS and mobile Linux distributions like postmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch.

But while the operating systems are open source, they often rely on proprietary, closed-source “blobs” to interact with the phone’s hardware. Recently the Free Software Foundation unveiled an effort to take aim at those blobs, and now the organization is providing more details about the Librephone initiative.

As explained in an announcement and interview with lead developer Rob Savoye, and a FAQ on the Librephone website, the goal is not to design a new smartphone operating system or build a new phone.

Instead, the idea is to reverse engineer the stuff that keeps existing operating systems from running completely free and open source software without any closed-source components.

This is a project that could take a long time to complete, and there’s no guarantee of success. But the idea is that over the next six months, the team “will work to analyze common nonfree blobs in current (mostly) free software operating systems.

What operating systems? At this point, it seems like the team is planning to use the Android-based LineageOS as a starting point.

But… again, the goal here isn’t to develop a whole new operating system. It’s to reverse engineer the firmware and binary blobs used in processors, wireless chips, and other components so that LineageOS and other operating systems can interact with that hardware without relying on “black box” code that’s inaccessible to users.

So it’s possible that if the Librephone initiative is successful, we could see the fruits of its labor applied to a wide range of operating systems. Which devices will be supported remains to be seen though. The Librephone project is taking aim at a moving target – by the time the team has reverse engineered the code for one set of smartphone hardware, it’s highly likely that next-gen hardware will already be available.

In other words, this is a project aimed at folks who value software freedom over convenience… because there’s a decent chance that if you can ever run completely free software on a phone, it’ll be a model with older hardware.