Summary: Society needs to welcome a new breed of telephony that strictly resists surveillance and also antagonises patent bureaucracy
SINCE the middle of 2007 we have warned that South Korean giant LG was paying Microsoft for Linux or at least legitimising the claim/blackmail. This affected LG's Linux-powered phones at the time (probably because of FAT) and later this extended to WebOS (after LG acquisition) and to Android [1] (very surveillance-friendly, courtesy of Google).
Right now the Android market is dominated by the other South Korean giant,
called Samsung, which also controls Tizen these days. Tizen is covered in the news this week [2] and also named as an alternative to Android [3]. Tizen assembled inside it many Linux-based consortia for phones after they had sort of collapsed onto one another (LiPS, LiMo, Moblin, MeeGo, etc.), so this is truly a cause for concern. Samsung -- like LG -- plays by Microsoft's rules (of extortion) on patents.
Jolla's Sailfish OS [4], Mozilla's Firefox OS, and Ubuntu's mobile OS (whatever they choose to call it this time and whenever they choose to release it after massive changes in expected time of arrival [5,6], vapourware [7], and an attempt to lure in developers based on the vapourware [8]) are some of the existing hopes we have left. There is also the KDE-led Plasma-oriented effort, among other smaller initiatives that use Linux and sometimes GNU (nobody would use Windows because it's technically inferior and
is in bed with the NSA).
Many other entities can easily start their own companies that develop mobile phones based on Linux and Free software [9]. It just requires capital. The folks behind anonymous E-mail services are not the only ones who now promote their phone based on claim of NSA resistance (today it's revealed that
the NSA hoards SMS messages by the billions). There's also Aral Balkan's effort (recently-released video above). The main barrier here is lack of patents, but they should snub those patents and perhaps join OIN.
We really need alternative to Android as Replicant is
not enough at this stage. It also mimics a deficient effort, merely trying to amend it with limited resources.
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Related/contextual items from the news:
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Tizen is designed to be a low-cost, highly configurable OS that will make portable devices available to a wider range of consumers. Its developers hope to create an alternative mobile ecosystem to break the stranglehold of the big phone companies. Tizen's promise is to let carriers maintain a competitive edge by producing devices tailored to a particular user base.
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The open source offering called Tizen, based on the Linux operating system, is expected to be installed on telephones sold from the end of March, NTT Docomo spokesman Jun Otori told AFP.
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Jolla was formed in late 2011 from a number of former Nokia Engineers who had been working on a number of Linux-based operating systems and handsets (including the Nokia N9). Just over two years later, their first handset (the self-titled Jolla) shipped with their Sailfish OS. I’ve been using the Jolla handset since mid-December, and it’s time to look at the handset in some more detail.
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Commercial smartphones running the mobile version of the Ubuntu Linux distro probably won't be available through carriers until 2015 at the earliest, a Canonical spokesman has revealed.
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Although we expected to see the Meizu MX3 running Ubuntu during this year’s CES, that hasn’t happened. Instead, we’ve learned that Canonical is working with multiple vendors to launch Ubuntu smartphones later in the year.
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The Ubuntu Linux team hopes to expand the open source operating system's application stack by drawing on community contributions of smartphone and tablet apps.
