Fairphone 3

[David Boddie]

On Wed Sep 25 08:04:38 UTC 2019, Michael Kesper wrote:

> I know purism pays some developers to integrate a full
> Gnome platform with a custom shell (phosh).

Disclosure: I'm working on writing documentation for Purism at the moment.
Disclaimer: I'm speaking for myself in this message.

> To my humble knowledge this seems to be the most active
> fully free software stack right now (other than AOSP)
> which can be implemented on real hardware phones.
> 
> https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Software_Reference.html

It looks like one or two things are out of date in that diagram. I'm also
reminded that the Software Reference section of the documentation is woefully
incomplete. There are only so many hours in the day.

Personally, I wish that there could have been a way to bring the most active
(or at least most prominent) efforts together to make the ideal phone stack,
or at least to cherry-pick some parts of different stacks to make a more
comprehensive phone environment. It seems a waste not to use existing
components that have seen extensive testing and use.

Alongside the effort to create GNOME-based stack, I have been impressed by
the activity in the Plasma Mobile community to get that working on the Librem
5 hardware, as well as on other development systems. The UBports developers
have also been quick to get their stack running on that hardware. I wasn't
really aware of the UBports development scene, and was surprised at how
active it is - they really seem to try and foster a sense of community around
the system.

The Fairphone 3 is a welcome development, as I noted in the FSFE discourse:

https://community.fsfe.org/t/recommended-android-phones/280/6

It would be interesting to see Replicant running on it, and on the Librem 5,
of course.

David