From jwoithe at just42.net Wed May 10 22:47:19 2023 From: jwoithe at just42.net (Jonathan Woithe) Date: Wed, 10 May 2023 22:17:19 +0930 Subject: [Grants] [LACTTE] Grant Application from Russell Coker for FOSS on Mobile Phones In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi Russell After reading through the "FOSS for mobile phones" grant application I have a few questions to help clarify what is planned for this project. The application outlines a significant number of tasks: LORA support, refinements needed to FOSS phones so they can be used as a "daily driver", security enhancements, and convergence to name a few. Each one of these appears to be fairly involved and won't all be completed quickly. Is it possible to provide a prioritised list of the work plan, a rough idea as to when the community might see the results, and an outline of how the community can expect to benefit from the work facilitated by this grant? It is noted that "The work needed to achieve the aim of making the PinePhone work well as a regular use mobile phone depends on what areas it has problems with." Have you investigated what these might be, as I expect this would facilitate your planning? Another stated aim is to "develop a community of developers for mobile FOSS in Australia". Are there specific ideas about how this might be done? The technical goals of the project are not clear from what was written in the grant application. Is it possible to provide more clarity around this? Finally, I note that there are other pinephone models which are half the price of the Pinephone Pro Explorer. Both are Linux-based phones, but there must be specific reasons why the grant requests the "Pro" version specifically. Could those reasons be shared? I am looking forward to your response so I can better understand the ideas behind the grant application. Regards jonathan From russell at coker.com.au Wed May 10 23:50:58 2023 From: russell at coker.com.au (Russell Coker) Date: Wed, 10 May 2023 23:50:58 +1000 Subject: [Grants] Re: [LACTTE] Grant Application from Russell Coker for FOSS on Mobile Phones In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2753507.BEx9A2HvPv@cupcakke> On Wednesday, 10 May 2023 22:47:19 AEST Jonathan Woithe wrote: > After reading through the "FOSS for mobile phones" grant application I have > a few questions to help clarify what is planned for this project. > > The application outlines a significant number of tasks: LORA support, > refinements needed to FOSS phones so they can be used as a "daily driver", > security enhancements, and convergence to name a few. Each one of these > appears to be fairly involved and won't all be completed quickly. Is it > possible to provide a prioritised list of the work plan, a rough idea as to > when the community might see the results, and an outline of how the > community can expect to benefit from the work facilitated by this grant? Part of the reason for the number of tasks is the differing goals that Yifei and I have. Yifei's interests are radio and I18N of which radio will be the first priority and the one with the most obvious success criteria. My interests are a phone that's usable for daily use (which involves improvements to battery life and getting the standard functions like contacts listing and integration working) as well as convergence and security. Convergence has some dependencies on things that I don't have the skills to directly work on (particularly Wayland). But some of the work has been done in this regard by Purism people (their CTO has blogged about having convergence working on the Librem5). My tests of convergence on the Librem5 indicate that there may have been some bugs in recent versions of the software that prevents previous functionality working correctly, and also that there is some hardware compatibility issues that need to be tested and tracked. I currently possess three USB-C docks which all have different levels of functionality with the Librem5, having another phone to test with will help in investigating those issues. My plans for security improvements have some elements that can be completed reasonably quickly. Getting the sandboxing of applications basically working with firejail is easy. I've started investigating the use of xdg-desktop- portal and ways of integrating that into a sandboxed environment. Yifei and I have been discussing ways of testing the sandbox (basically running a shell inside a sandbox configured in the same way as an application sandbox and verifying that it can't perform certain classes of inappropriate activity). One thing to do in the near future is to determine the best way of sandboxing "desktop" (or in this case phone) apps, snap, bubblewrap, and something like what Chromium does are all things to consider. Documenting the differences between these different alternatives might end up being a noteworthy milestone. While Yifei and I have plans that differ significantly I'm submitting this as a single grant application because one aim is to start a community for FOSS phone development in Australia. TLDR: Ordering for me will be: 1) Improving phone utility for daily use. Finding ways of getting it to work well, documenting the configuration, and developing tests for regression. 2) Convergence. One of the first things to start but will face some delays due to Wayland and hardware driver support. 3) Sandboxing of apps. I'm already making progress on investigating this. > It is noted that "The work needed to achieve the aim of making the PinePhone > work well as a regular use mobile phone depends on what areas it has > problems with." Have you investigated what these might be, as I expect > this would facilitate your planning? Poor battery life is a known issue, and a "fix" to poor battery life causing problems in receiving calls is another known issue. I will discover how bad these problems are when I get access to hardware. > Another stated aim is to "develop a community of developers for mobile FOSS > in Australia". Are there specific ideas about how this might be done? I think that when Yifei and I start getting some work done in this area it will interest other people to join in. When I can make a FOSS phone my daily driver it will inspire others to do the same. > The technical goals of the project are not clear from what was written in > the grant application. Is it possible to provide more clarity around this? The problems with making a clear technical description are the difficulty in determining what the problems might be without having access to the hardware and the fact that the work will be partly determined by what aspects of the functionality other people have got working. I think that the best thing to do is to have a list of things to work on, if one area of work is unavailable then I can work on the others and consider it a success if good progress is made on them. > Finally, I note that there are other pinephone models which are half the > price of the Pinephone Pro Explorer. Both are Linux-based phones, but there > must be specific reasons why the grant requests the "Pro" version > specifically. Could those reasons be shared? The Pro version has faster CPU cores and more RAM which will be a significant benefit for compiling on the phone and for use in convergence. But I have to admit that I just like newer fancier hardware. So we can probably get it all done with the cheaper one. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ From jwoithe at just42.net Sat May 13 22:16:33 2023 From: jwoithe at just42.net (Jonathan Woithe) Date: Sat, 13 May 2023 21:46:33 +0930 Subject: [Grants] [LACTTE] Grant Application from Russell Coker for FOSS on Mobile Phones In-Reply-To: <2753507.BEx9A2HvPv@cupcakke> References: <2753507.BEx9A2HvPv@cupcakke> Message-ID: Hi Russell On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 11:50:58PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote: > On Wednesday, 10 May 2023 22:47:19 AEST Jonathan Woithe wrote: > > After reading through the "FOSS for mobile phones" grant application I have > > a few questions to help clarify what is planned for this project. > > > > The application outlines a significant number of tasks: LORA support, > > refinements needed to FOSS phones so they can be used as a "daily driver", > > security enhancements, and convergence to name a few. Each one of these > > appears to be fairly involved and won't all be completed quickly. Is it > > possible to provide a prioritised list of the work plan, a rough idea as to > > when the community might see the results, and an outline of how the > > community can expect to benefit from the work facilitated by this grant? > > Part of the reason for the number of tasks is the differing goals that Yifei > and I have. ... Thanks for taking the time to provide a detailed response. It has certanly cleared up a number of points from my perspective. The two week consultation period for this grant application has now closed. Linux Australia Council will consider it at the next scheduled meeting on 24 May 2023 and provide the outcome within a few days of the meeting. Regards jonathan From jwoithe at just42.net Wed May 24 20:55:43 2023 From: jwoithe at just42.net (Jonathan Woithe) Date: Wed, 24 May 2023 20:25:43 +0930 Subject: [Grants] FOSS on Mobile Phones - grant application decision Message-ID: Dear Russell FOSS on Mobile Phones - Russell Coker The Linux Australia Council discussed this grant application at its meeting on 24 May 2023. We are pleased to inform you that the grant application was approved - congratulations! The grant is to cover the expenses as outlined in the original grant application[1]. As a condition of the grant, Linux Australia requires that those involved submit a talk proposal that describes their achievements for the next Everything Open conference. This is in addition to the usual Annual Report contribution mentioned below. Please email the Linux Australia treasurer (treasurer at linux.org.au) to arrange the required payments. As outlined in the grant guidelines, Linux Australia request that you provide a brief report about the activities funded by this grant for inclusion in our Annual Report. We ask that this be sent via email to council at linux.org.au by the end of November to allow sufficient time for its incorporation into the report. If you have further questions feel free to contact myself or any member of the Linux Australia Council. Jonathan Woithe (on behalf of Linux Australia) [1] http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/grants/2023-April/000143.html