[ale] Cory Doctorow, right again

[Charles Shapiro]

Might've been Replicant ( http://replicant.us/ )?  The G1 is one of
the very few phones that supports it.  I might try it on mine.

-- CHS


On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 1:11 PM, mike at trausch.us <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
> On 03/17/2012 12:18 PM, Charles Shapiro wrote:
>> Please to note this issue is only tangentially related to the "I can
>> read the code" security argument over open source software.  This is
>> more basic.  Regardless of your feeliings about open versus closed
>> software and the security or other trade-offs involved in that, you
>> must Must MUST have control over what's installed on your device.  (
>> And yes, the Radio and other binary blobs in Cyanogen-Mod bother me. )
>
> Indeed.  I don't like them, myself.
>
> There was something I read a while back about an effort to produce free
> drivers for these phones.  That would be pretty cool, because it would
> enable people to be able to experiment with things like using a BSD, or
> completely getting rid of the Bionic/Dalvik/Java/Android stack and strip
> things back to a very basic interface.
>
> I don't want a phone where I am forced to use a command line to make and
> receive phone calls, of course.  But I want something that is
> lightweight, open, and much more "securable" than current Android
> systems are.  For example, I would like to be able to make secure
> telephone calls with my phone.  While that can likely be done in the
> phone's current state, it would be far better done if we have access to
> all of the source.
>
> It's a shame that the Linux kernel developers feel the way that they do
> about binary blobs, actually.  They are the only people that truly have
> the power to do something about it, and the more deployment they see the
> more power they have.  Nobody at this point is about to say that they're
> going to simply abandon their Linux systems, and I think that if the
> core development community really pushed, I think that companies would
> say "well, we need to release things, then".
>
> Perhaps I am overly confident.
>
>        --- Mike
>
> --
> A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
> than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
>                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>