The Open Source Foundation has officially put into operation the project Librephone, announced ten days ago at an event dedicated to the organization’s fortieth anniversary. In the long term, Librephone is focused on reverse engineering the proprietary blobs responsible for interacting with mobile device hardware, as well as developing and promoting free alternatives to replace proprietary components used in Android-based firmware.
The project will not develop a new free mobile operating system or its own edition of Android. In my work
Librephone builds on existing open source projects and firmware, but will not join them, but will use them as a basis for expanding the use of open source technologies in mobile devices. The initiative is being touted as an expansion of previous work to promote free software for personal computers and servers, which will now be extended to mobile devices.
In the first stage, which will last approximately 6 months, the project will conduct research proprietary files used in firmware based on the Android platform. The focus will be on proprietary blobs remaining in open source firmware such as LineageOS. The research will also document how the identified blobs are used by the Linux kernel, and understand how they can be legally reverse engineered using the “clean room methodology.
Based on After completing the research, the objectives of the project will be formulated and the best device for further work will be selected. The idea is to identify the smartphone with the fewest blobs and the best support for free components, after which it will be used as a reference when developing a replacement for the remaining proprietary components.
Currently, Librephone participants already have prepared tools for extracting proprietary files used to support hardware in firmware LineageOS 22.2. The tools are used to analyze and comparing the use of proprietary files in assemblies for 210 devices supported in LineageOS. As a result, a DB is formed with metadata about the use of blobs in all these devices and a set of scripts for creating your own Lineage assemblies.