This depends on the devices. Some of them like pixel and fairphone ones allow bootloader relocking, lineage supports this, and iodé too.
I think that when people make the transition to a custom rom, they often don't care about that because they primarily want to give a second life to a slightly outdated phone. Then, some of them become more conscious of the possible danger of having an unlock bootloader, and choose next a smartphone with relockable bootloader.
I don't see well the point in this remark. Releasing free software has many consequences, and among them, one is to give freedom to people.
Giving freedom to people is however the starting point of our story: we wanted to give the freedom to use a smartphone without, as much as possible, being spied on by tech giants. We accomplished (probably imperfectly, but honestly) that even with closed source software, for the people who put their trust in us. So no, our primary goal has never been to create a free software, just for the beauty of creating a free software: we're more interested in people freedom.
Releasing the sources is just one step beyond, to increase trust in our work, and attract more people to a new way of considering their smartphone, whether it is directly with our rom or other roms that can now use our work. We even chose to license the heart of our developments with the AGPL, to guarantee that improvements made by others will be beneficial to everyone.
That being said, as a developer who likes the code for itself, I like the idea to create a free software ;-)
No, it wasn't! We explained the reasons in many places (forums etc), and people were free to trust us or not. We also promised to open the sources when we thought it was the good timing, and that's what we did.
And I completely agree with you that a privacy focused rom must be open source, of course...
Yes that's weird ;-)
Especially from me: I began working on android by building a GSI, maybe you remember, we've been in touch on a few issues.
The problem is: lack of time, always something else to do that we consider of higher priority. Maybe a bad strategy and we should reorder our priorities though, especially because GSIs became a so great stuff, thanks to your incredible work.
Distributing a GSI has a nasty counterpart though: the extreme diversity of issues that it immediately generates. Having maintained a GSI for some time and tried to improve it as much as I could to solve at least boot problems etc, I perfectly know how time-consuming it is... An option would be to provide no support for it, but I don't find that satisfactorily.
So, maybe we'll build a GSI at some point in time, or we'll provide help and some kind of official support to someone for building and maintaining one, now that we opened our sources.
The smallest phones we support are the samsung A5, sony XA2, fairphone FP3 (although a bit thick). Although they are a bit outdated now, they can be sufficient for certain usages. We would like a lot to support recent small phones, but the tendency goes to bigger and bigger...
You may want to email hn@ycombinator.com to find out why your comments are all dead; I've vouched for a couple of them because they didn't seem to violate any rules, but I would bet asking them for formal guidance would go a long way
As answered in another comment, there is not just one license, there are plenty of licenses, in each repository we published. Most of them are forks of AOSP / lineage repositories, and keep their original licenses, and some of them are fully ours, and are licensed under AGPLv3.
There are dozens of repository, starting from here: https://gitlab.com/iode/os
Licenses are at the root of each one. Our policy is the following:
- for existing repositories that we fork (the vast majority of them), we just keep the existing license.
- for repositories that we create from scratch without reusing existing code, we use the AGPLv3 license.
This is a big list in our point of vue. We began with one device, then added a second one, then a third... We go step by step, for the devices and in our software developments, and are not in a hurry to satisfy all the wishes of everyone. People just choose what suits them best, that's not a matter of number of supported devices.
Yes we use microG and all our supported phones actually pass SafetyNet. It seems that some banking apps still don't work, but most of them yes.
We wanted to follow our own road. Isn't diversity a good thing for people? Which does not mean that there cannot be cross-fertilization, that's why we're happy to fully join the open-source scene now.
I think that when people make the transition to a custom rom, they often don't care about that because they primarily want to give a second life to a slightly outdated phone. Then, some of them become more conscious of the possible danger of having an unlock bootloader, and choose next a smartphone with relockable bootloader.