LibrePlanet: Conference/2010/Hacking/Free phones workshop

This workshop will be held at Boston_Software_Freedom_Day.

This document is in-progress and is being discussed via IRC in #futurephonefreedom on OFTC.

We will go over the following:

General overview of free / partially free smartphones available in the US market

List of free/mostly-free phones:

OpenMoko
Prē
G1, MyTouch (Android)
ADP (Android)

To be released soon:

N900 (Maemo 5)

Criteria to be counted:

available for purchase
ability to make phone calls
ability to let users develop software for it
not required to void phone warranty to benefit (in some way) from freedoms provided. Eg. sure you can install Debian on an iPhone, but that doesn't mean the iPhone counts.

Usability vs. Freedom

OpenMoko is completely free, but not really usable. Usability should be graded as follows:

can be used as a phone reliably (includes address book)
can be used for common smartphone tasks, such as calendaring and web browsing
can synchronize with external services
...

Developer freedom

Ability to develop on the phone using a free development environment. (I think all of them can be developed using only free software. [look into Android]).

Stack freedom

Go over, for each phone, what parts of the phone stack are [not] free. Maybe a chart to show all of the phones in comparison (there's bound to be something online that compares this already; if not, let's make it).

Hackability freedom

Ok, so you want to "root" your phone (if it is not already rooted). What can you do with that power? How hard is it to gain this access?

Carrier freedom

If the phone is locked to a carrier, what is that carrier's attitude toward exercising your SW freedom and what are the potential repercussions of going against their stated desires?

Going forward toward a usable, free phone

What parts of the SW stack are missing to make each platform entirely free and usable?

Navigation menu