The Software Freedom Law Show

Episode 0x1F: Is Mobile Software Freedom Possible?

19 January 2010

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Summary

Aaron Williamson, Karen Sandler, and Bradley M. Kuhn discuss the issues of software freedom on mobile telephone devices.

This show was released on Tuesday 19 January 2010; its running time is 00:47:32.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:32)

• SFLC experimented first with using the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner. (06:12)
• Aaron noted that the Android system is developed by the Open Handset Alliance, although Google is the primary force behind it. (07:35)
• Harald Welte wrote a blog post about Android that talks about some of the that he sees with it. (07:58)
• Greg Kroah-Hartman has discussed that various Android-related Linux work has been dropped from staging. (08:43)
• Android does not use uClibc nor the GNU C library, but rather a BSD-forked C library called bionic. This was probably done to avoid the LGPL. (08:55)
• Bradley took the AP Computer Science exam in Pascal, taught it in C++ in the mid-1990s, but the course moved to Java in the late 1990s. There was an announcement about AB exam disappearing, among other things. (11:58)
• Aaron and Bradley launched the Replicant project to investigate the possibility of a fully Free Software build on the HTC Dream. (14:45)
• Bradley mentioned that the OpenBTS project is workking on a FLOSS GSM stack. (15:52)
• There have been many Cease and Desist letters from Google to people who redistributing proprietary firmware remixes. (16:54)
• Aaron built a list of the proprietary libraries on the HTC Dream Android/Linux default install. (18:12)
• Bradley mentioned mcgrof (aka Luis Rodriguez), who works for Atheros and helped make sure the ath5k and ath9k are fully Free Software driven. (22:38)
• There is a long list of proprietary components needed for the Maemo platform to work. The Cool900 blog has an updated list and thorough breakdown. (23:35)
• Bradley mentioned that there is a #replicant IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (26:56), and a Replicant mailing list. (27:32)
• We briefly discussed Symbian and that fact that someday it's supposed to be fully freed. However, Bradley mentioned that the governance is fully corporate controlled and they don't even have a working build that can be installed on a modern phone using Free Software yet. (31:10)
• Graziano build a list of known FLOSS applications for Android/Linux. (39:15)
• Here is another list of GPL'd Android/Linux applications available at the Application Market. (41:12)

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Tags: bkuhn, karen, aaronw, mobile, android

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