A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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It depends where you draw the line of what is GrapheneOS. Everything they do is free and open-source. If you build it for emulator or Waydroid, it would indeed be FOSS: no proprietary blobs in sight unless you count your host’s GPU firmware to taint the whole thing. The build scripts to dump your firmware blobs from your own device, building GrapheneOS, bunding it all back together, sign the build and flash it on your device, all open-source.
The only part where blobs are involved is the downloadable prebuilts which does include the blobs otherwise it wouldn’t boot at all. They’re not including blobs in their project. They’re including the blobs that are already on your device and also downloadable from Google. It’s not like they made their own proprietary blobs they hide the source for.
The GNU guys say that’s unacceptable as any proprietary software is unacceptable, therefore the whole thing is tainted and worthless. They think the same thing of coreboot/libreboot.
In my opinion, GrepheneOS is fine. It’s the best that can be done, and their project in itself is FOSS, even if running it on actual hardware requires a few blobs to be added, and it allows users to opt-in to installing a sandboxed Google package. The same I call Linux FOSS even if it can upload a firmware to my GPU so amdgpu works. At least the entire loading of the firmware is in my control, and I can verify that the blob being uploaded is the one I expect, even if the blob is proprietary.
Nothing that you replace with GrapheneOS is proprietary. The blobs are a no-op. Running sandboxed proprietary code is better. It’s a net positive and reclaims some of your freedoms by being able to control and monitor the sandbox.
But what about endorsing play store when alternatives are available? Yes it’s sandboxes but then also other more open solutions exists
Is it really endorsement to offer the user upon initial setup to install it, along with fdroid?
I’d say that’s just general compatibility, most users have at least one play store app they can’t just stop using, in my case that would be the banking apps I need to be able to pay online.
They are actually against Fdroid and endorse only play store. ONLY play store is available in their official appstore.
Is that a recent change? I somewhat distinctly remember being offered Fdroid during the initial setup as well.
I’ve been using GrapheneOS for about a year and I’ve never seen F-Droid bundled in their installer or app store. They’ve been vocally against F-Droid for quite some time. Other more FOSS focused projects bundle F-Droid.
I don’t think it’s about FOSS-ness as to why they don’t like F-Droid, but security and privacy. They don’t want to give up signing keys and compilation duties to F-Droid, and I don’t blame them. Even with reproducible builds, almost nobody is publicly verifying projects that claim to have them (Signal anyone?).