Why is a fully free software Android stack necessary?
We believe that freedom is an important end in itself — that software developers should respect the rights of users to share and modify the software they use. But the importance of freedom is made particularly evident by the example of Google G1/ADP1 (the first commercial Android phone). While most of the software running on the phone is free, and can be distributed by anyone, some components are proprietary.
In addition to the dispensable “Google Experience” applications, such as GMail and Google Maps, these components include several libraries and drivers necessary for interfacing with the phone’s hardware. (Here is a full list.) Since these components are not free software, the user community cannot redistribute them. And since some of them are necessary to make the phone work, the user community can’t share working firmwares.
Which devices are supported?
Take a look at our list of devices.
Do you have a “market” I could use to download free software applications?
Yes, it’s called F-Droid. It’s a GPLv2 client app that comes configured with a repository hosting only free as in freedom applications. You can help us by submitting your libre application for inclusion on our libre repository.
Hi,
I formely had a android phone. I chose this system because I thought it would respect my freedom. But I was wrong: on top of the proprietary conponents, it had all the caracteristics of the worst proprietary systems: it always asks you to log in with a google acount and then communicates your location to google. I also know that google had the power to remove applications remotely.
I wish to know if those problems have been thought and worked on in your system.
Thanks in advance.
You are confusing free software with privacy.
Android is licensed under a free license, the Apache 2.0 license, and so everybody has the four freedom of free software.
Then vendors chose to ship Android including the proprietary google apps (google maps, talk, gmail, market, etc.) and are those ones that push you to login with google and/or to share your location.
Replicant includes only free software. We don’t include any google app, we have libre alternatives for each of them.
Our “market” is F-Droid. The client app is free software licensed under the GPL license. Its repository of applications includes only free software apps.
If you want more information please consider joining our mailing list and/or irc channel because here in the comments it’s hard to discuss.
Thanks.
I own an Android phone (Motorola Milestone). Recently I experimented with AOSP based CyanogenMod. The OS worked rather well, but the installation process was tricky. I thought that Android is an Open Source project under Apache v2 license.
My questions are:
Does that mean I can change the software, even the OS?
The license did not prevent the seller to install mechanisms to prevent me from doing so?
Thanks in advance
I wish I could have a free OS on my phone, but it can’t use Replicant (Samwung Wave, with that crappy BADA on it). Next phone I’ll have will be a HTC dream, and will use Replicant, no doubt about it!
Can I use Replicant in parallel with the Google Market app? Will one interfere with the other? Can Replicant manage apps installed by Google market (and vice versa)?
We don’t endorse using google market because it is proprietary software.
Anyway we aren’t aware of any problems about using multiple market clients.
Using Replicant you can manage any apk manually.
Reviewing the goal of Replicant, I wonder why it is not listed as one of the Free Distribution by the FSF here:
https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
Are there still certain criteria that need to be met?
Actually _being_ a GNU distro would be THE criteria, I guess.
Reading the requirements/reasons OSes were excluded, it seems you only need to follow three basic rules to be on the list of free distros:
1. be 100% free software, everything must have source code and respect the four freedoms
2. do not host non-free software in the repo/app store of your distribution
3. Do not endorse the use of non-free software
These are the reasons stated for why Non gnu systems like *BSD and Haiku are not listed.
It may not be listed as a free operating system, but under Free Software for Android, it shows and links to Replicant. That’s actually how I found this.
Hello,
just to check if I understood correctly – Replicant also tries to run FLOSS instead of proprietary hardware drivers? The modem, WiFi, etc..? And not only tries it already runs FLOSS (and if I choose *only* FLOSS) on “supported” devices? To put it differently, is this the same from the point of freedom as OpenMoko (appart that this is actually usable on common phones)?
The hardware drivers as present in the Linux kernel are free and released. What we do replace are the user-space binaries and libraries that are doing the real protocol work with the hardware (consider the kernel only as a “transport” layer).
On the hardware itself, non-free software is still running. Sometimes it’s in the chip, sometimes we have to load the firmware from another place in the phone’s memory and sometimes the file (firmware) is part of the system, and on this case, we don’t distribute it.
For the modem, the firmware is stored in a dedicated partition in memory, and we do load it to the modem chip, so we can have working modem. Though, the software that “talks” with the modem is free, we have written it and implemented the modem protocol ourselves.
So from the point of view of freedom and compared to the openmoko gta02, Replicant is the same as any 100% free OS for the freerunner, but you won’t have all the features (because we don’t ship the non-free firmwares, like for wifi).
Also, Android devices have non-free bootloaders, while the freerunner has a free (u-boot) bootloader. This is a bit out of the scope of the operating system, though this is important.
There will be a possibility to view Replicant on Galaxy Nexus in future?
Well, the port would of course be possible and as far as we know, Galaxy Nexus would be a great candidate for Replicant. Here are the main reasons it’s not done yet:
- We need to get a device (it’s expensive)
- We need people to work on it and we are all (we are 2 devs working on the project and I’m the one involved the most) very busy with other devices/projects
- We would need to port Replicant changes to ICS, as we are currently running on gingerbread