https://chrichri.ween.de/o/cffc6733c9a74ae2a3ad3ccc8c8a0923

@fsf@hostux.social @fsfe@media.fsfe.org

Every few hours my thoughts start cycling around the idea to free Android.

About reversing blobs in a cleanroom I had the following thought:

I pretty well know the SAMBA project, because the company I work for delivers support for SAMBA and takes part in its development.

In my opinion SAMBA is an example for a very successful attempt of reverse engineering closed source. In the end Microsoft had to give in and started to work together with the SAMBA community in some kind of manner and everywhere you find smb you'll find any device (nas, workstation, whatever) running SAMBA or anything based on the SAMBA code.

This success took part in a very slow moving environment. Microsoft designed SMB and Active Directory for huge networks running in a stable and very slow moving manner. This gave the SAMBA team the time to get market shares for their FLOSS solution. They had the time to make it work to a point that people looking to talk to a Windows Network without having to run Windows and/or pay license fees started using SAMBA (and paying SAMBA developers to enhance and adopt the code).

Compared to the environment the blobs for Android devices live in it becomes clear that this SAMBA success factor - having time - will not apply for the FSFs project to reverse these blobs.

Developers of these reversed blobs will not be payed by any market participant to enhance or alter there blob replacement - I'm not able to think about any good reason. Companies wanting to sell a product for profit will just base their effort on Android or iOS. Why should they have interest to replace any of the working mobile ecosystems?

I'm still wondering why people at FSF opted for this direction instead of helping to build a new ecosystem running at our own speed making us independent of decisions taken elsewhere.