The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced its project to bring mobile phone freedom to users. “Librephone” is an initiative to reverse-engineer obstacles preventing mobile phone freedom until its goal is achieved.
Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones.
Not a good choice for a name, at first I though it was just another linux phone that would be useless for 90% of people.
Very cool project instead, hope this can lead the fondation for a 100% open source mobile OS.
Honest to God, I thought a “Librephone” was something that already existed. I think I was thinking of the PinePhone or smth.
Librem 5 is what you’re thinking of
Agree. Marketing isn’t really the in the wheelhouse of most Linux/open source projects.
Google is what happens when good marketing meets OSS, so careful what you wish for.
Do you think good marketing necessarily leads to unethical business practices?
I feel it’s a bit like the usability vs security dilemma… you can try to optimize to have both, but then you won’t have as a result neither the most secure system nor the smoothest user-friendly experience, but something in between (you might still consider that “secure” or “usable”, but that just depends on where you set your expectations).
If you want to maximize marketing then the result won’t be as ethical as it could be, and if you want to maximize ethics then the result won’t be as marketable as it could be.
good marketing does not require maximizing it, I think. I see where you’re coming from though, any effort spent on marketing could have been spent to create a better product. Having the perfect product is useless when nobody knows about it, though, so as always there is a balance to achieve.
Marketing is unethical because it is consentless
Doesn’t have to be. Marketing also includes a website, that you as a user need to consciously visit to see, which I would definitely consider consensual.
Commercials like billboards are a different story, those definitely suck
<gestures at all the enshittified software products from the last 30 years>
In our current economic philosophy, yes.
I think you mentioned a keyword you’re ignoring here: product. This enshittification happens in a commercial environment. Good marketing does not require a commercial product.
Whatever it is you’re referring to here certainly doesn’t change the fact that the FSF sucks at marketing.
Which makes sense, since that is not what I was saying. I’m saying that a FOSS project with good marketing doesn’t necessarily become like google.
And thank god it isn’t
No I get that, and I agree for the most part, but do we want people outside our niche to use this stuff? If so then making it more palatable and accessible is important. Look at proton; it’s done amazing things for Linux adoption by lowering the fear factor that Linux has had for much of its life.
There’s a happy medium imo. Linux is enjoying a bit of a golden age at the moment because so many people are doing brilliant work making it usable and nice. But if the userbase becomes too large, tech companies will see their bottom lines affected, and it’ll be enshittified like everything else. And it’ll become a more attractive target for malware, of course.
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