Hey all, obviously I’ve been thinking about this for a while so I have a lot to say. This is mostly about how the technicals of PureOS and LibremOS relate to policy and development.
We’re building LibremOS as the thinnest layer possible over PureOS, since our focus remains on PureOS. LibremOS won’t have an entirely separate package repository. It’s going to use the PureOS repositories, plus an additional source containing packages that PureOS can’t contain. LibremOS enables us to reach users that we otherwise can’t, when they can’t fully eliminate all nonfree services from their lives at once.
One of the biggest barriers to this is communications apps. Users that want to use free software simply can’t expect all their family and friends to leave a platform at once. We don’t want users to have to make excuses for their communication apps breaking frequently because of their choice of OS.
When native apps aren’t feasible, our top strategy is browser-based apps. That’s already a solution many people use in the browser itself. But it’s cumbersome to have all your “apps” nested inside your browser, and it’s not discoverable for users transitioning to free software without the help of an expert friend (and we care about those users too!)
Creating an app container around a web site is not a new idea. It already improves your privacy and security stance versus using the web site in the browser itself, because it isolates that app’s profile from your regular browser profile. And again, the browser and all tooling to create such an app is free software. The reason these apps can’t go into PureOS is because virtually all of them will immediately load proprietary JavaScript when you open the app. We can’t include that app in PureOS because it’s steering toward nonfree software.
The major parts of the tooling to do this are actually part of PureOS and already present in PureOS Crimson. We just can’t include the metadata to actually specify the web site to use as an “app” in PureOS. Consequently, this leaves LibremOS as essentially a combination of PureOS + branding + app metadata, at least for web apps.
We know some Android apps will eventually be part of this strategy too. It’s not easy to change banks, and many of them do not offer the same features through web as on Android/iOS. But whenever form this takes, again the infrastructure containing only free software will be part of PureOS, and LibremOS will contain the metadata telling us how to get and install that app.
Like we’ve said a few times, we can’t expect newcomers to jump to the top of the freedom ladder all at once. We need to help them climb.