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When I was working in the mobile industry, I was told repeatedly that a 100% FOSS phone would be impossible. Not only is the existing tech proprietary and paten
by Hasknewbie 7y ago
When I was working in the mobile industry, I was told repeatedly that a 100% FOSS phone would be impossible. Not only is the existing tech proprietary and patent-encumbered, even if somehow you could get past that your GSM radio must be certified before going to market. And if your radio is FOSS-based that means an end-user can toy with the baseband, therefore you will never get your cert, period. The stuff at the lowest level must locked down before being allowed on a public mobile network.
- awinter-py 7y agoYou can release reproducible signed builds that the user can verify. You can be open source without allowing users to upload new blobs. You can still accept PRs and stuff.
- lstodd 7y agoI wonder if you'd have to recertify after each pr merge
- toast0 7y agoYou would need to certify each signed release. Most likely, you wouldn't make a signed release for each PR, because of the time and expense involved, until you got to the point were changed were few and far between.
- amenod 7y agoNo, just before actually releasing it. Nobody cares about the code as long as it is not running on the devices.
- lperkins2 7y agoThis is what caused me to totally dump nvidia. Their new cards require signed drivers to enable boosting behaviour, and they are unwilling to build and sign the nouveau driver. It's not like it's hard to set up a buildbot...
- dbuder 7y agoYou can release the baseband driver without giving users the ability to edit it.