The Free Software Foundation today announced the LibrePhone project with a goal of creating a fully free software OS for mobile devices and to reverse-engineer obstacles where necessary.

The FSF describes their new LibrePhone project as:

"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.

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Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS."

A phone operating system had been on [1]the FSF high priority project list since at least 2017 albeit with limited success and activity.

Those wanting to learn more about LibrePhone can do so via the [2]FSF.org announcement .

The project site is [3]librephone.fsf.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FSF-2017-High-Priority-Projects

[2] https://www.fsf.org/news/librephone-project

[3] https://librephone.fsf.org/