We need open source everything, and that doesn't happen in one night

Backlog

Many people in the open source community complain that many “wares” we currently use are not open source. The hardware or the firmware is not open source. And that’s the end of it. Because the modem firmware in the phones is not open source, then we shouldn’t use any phone. That’s the end of the world. But the road to open source “everything” goes step by step, inch by inch. Then in the end, we could have a device with open source software, firmware and hardware.

I typed the following two paragraphs in a chat room and I thought it’s better if I post it here, too.

Step by Step

Most of the time some are seeing these stuff as black and white. Either everything is auditable, secure and it’s good. Or not and it’s bad. The road to perfection is step by step. We currently need open source hardware and firmware. And most of the time some people fully disregard a device which is not fully open source.

But IMO, having part of a device open source is much better than having it all closed source. It opens the doors for other parts to be open source. We currently lack usable open source firmware for so many hardwares. At this point, talking about fully open source HW doesn’t benefit us much.

Now, we need to support hardwares which have got open source firmware and possibly partially open source hardware. After that, we can go for open sourcing more parts.

For instance, in the world of Single board Computers, We have Raspberry Pi which has got binary blobs. And we have Libre Computer boards which have got very good open source firmwares. Imagine! They have paid much so we have an NPU with open source firmware. When we’ve got ARM SoCs with good open source support, we can think about building a Linux phone with them. Of course, the modem would still have closed source firmware. But when these phones are actually useful and quite widespread in the open source community, people will try to get the next thing open source, the modem for instance.

Note: Thanks to Pine64 offering PinePhone, some already hacked the modem on this device!