Software Freedom

In this post, I would like to veer off-course for a bit and discuss a topic I find myself talking about more and more, which is freedom in all its senses. I will discuss certain kinds of freedom we have, ones we’re slowly gaining back, and what I understand under freedom of choice.

The freedom to disappear

This first one may sound drastic, but in some cases, this freedom can be a life-saver, both figuratively, and literally. If you ever find yourself in an abusive relationship or in difficulties with people who may want to hurt you, this freedom is indispensable. As a citizen, you can choose to drop everything, walk away, and start a new life. I cannot say whether you will have luck long-term, this will depend mostly on your habits and discipline (as it is easy to slip up, and from the day you disappear, you need to be on the top of your game, all day, every day.)

This freedom depends, of course, on your relation to your citizen’s duties: If you’re running away from debt, you will most likely be hunted by the police, and those suckers work slowly, but they do. In case you’re running away from an abuser, your abuser may put out a missing person’s report. In that case, the police can actually help you! You can report to a police station, they do a welfare check, and you can tell them that you left of your own volition and that you don’t want to be contacted. In this case, the police cannot give out your current whereabouts.

Truth be told, I hope I never have to use this freedom, as it is a last resort. On the other hand, let’s talk about what we lost and are slowly gaining back: User-replacable batteries

Hold out with your phone until 2027, you will not regret it

In 2027, a new directive from the EU is coming. It states that all mobile devices sold in the EU are required to have user-replacable batteries. This is a thing of the past, and I’m so glad it’s coming back! It’s amazing to see, really. If you had an iPhone, I feel sorry for you, but the Android masterracehad it much better in the past: If your battery ran out, as batteries in the 2010’s often did, you could just get another one, pop in a fresh battery, and you’ve got hours of usage at your fingertips! Compared to the fastest chargers, which can charge from 0 to 100% in an hour or less, it is still nothing compared to the fact that we could go from 0 to 100% in a minute or two. This is a freedom we gave up willingly, all in the pursuit of slimmer, harder-to-maintain phones.

What did we get in return? Arguably, the only thing we gained was a denser battery, capable of holding more charge. If you mention waterproofing (IP67 and better) as a reason to have glued-together phones, I’ll have you know that my Xcover 3 that I had 10 years ago had IP67 and a user-removable battery. I could go swimming with the thing, then dry it off, replace the battery and it would be just fine.

The other argument is thickness: The iPhone 15 is an amazing 7.8mm thick. That’s without a back cover. The Xcover 3? 10mm, barely 2mm thicker. This is also without a case, but which madman does not put a case on their phone in this day and age?!

The option of having a user-replacable battery will mean that phones generally last longer. The first thing to die in a phone is not the mainboard, it’s not the display, it’s usually the battery. Case in point: My mum’s phone is just shy of 2 years old, and it started overheating a month or so ago. Luckily, we spotted that it’s still under warranty, so we will try to get the battery replaced from the seller, but it points to a huge flaw in phones today: Had the battery been user-replacable, it would be a question of 20$ and 5 minutes of my mum’s time to pop in a healthy, new battery. This way? We will probably wait a month for us to hear that it’s not an issue, or they will give her the money back.

If you want to try the battery-replacable lifestyle today, you have to look for the Fairphone. Otherwise, it’s either an unrepairable phone, or a dumbphone. This segueways beautifully into my next topic.

The illusion of choice

In today’s world, we have so much to buy, yet how much of that is actually necessary? How much do you need the latest gadget, the new phone? How much of this is actually governed by some planned obsolescence in your device? If your battery is dying, the phone will get slower to compensate, or it will not do so and your battery will last for a few hours. Either way, you’ll tell yourself that since this phone is no longer the fastest and best, you will have to replace it. All this leads to more e-waste, more bullshit.

You do have a choice, though. You can always get a dumbphone! Why not? It does phone calls, doesn’t it? It has text messages, right? So what else do you want? I know what: all the shit we got used to in the past 15 years. We all got used to our phones being smart that we barely noticed the enshittification. What started with a boom of features (new cameras, smart functions, internet access that’s on par with fibre) has now encased us in a gilded cage of irrepairable, all-glass fragile machines.

But the freedom of choice, for me, means that if someone wants to enshittify themselves, more power to them. You want that new iPhone every year on day 1? If you want to, no one should stop you. I just believe that your freedom to choose shitty devices year after year should not result in me not having my phone for 5+ years just because it’s cool to have a soldered in battery. Furthermore, I see tons of people locked into a cage by concerted marketing efforts: You only have one choice because it’s in the manufacturer’s best interest to keep you locked into their ecosystem. Google and Apple are great examples, but if you start looking, you may find there is no need to replace if you can repair.

Another example I can think of today is the Thinkpad, Libreboot, and the FSF. This is where a freedom of choice can be really seen.

• Do you want a laptop that’s cheap, but can chug along just fine? Get a Thinkpad (yes, I’m a fanboy).
• Do you want your Thinkpad to run a bit faster and have a balance of performance and software freedom? Libreboot is the answer.
• Are you a free software enthusiast on par with papa Stallman and vomit at the sight of proprietary blobs? There is a fork of Libreboot with no proprietary blobs.

The free software is like autism, it exists on a spectrum. You can simply not care about your freedom at all and rock a Macbook, you can be a hardcore FOSS fan and read this on a free hardware, free software phone or laptop (like the one Richard Stallman uses), or you can be somewhere inbetween, okay with some blobs as long as they add to the overall experience, but not with everything the manufacturer includes in the box.

Personally, I fell from a hardcore FOSS enthusiast (running a librebooted X200 most of my university years) to the in-between camp. I understand that some blobs are necessary for the functions I want (like Thunderbolt), but I am not a corporate IT guy, so what the hell would I require the Intel Management Engine for? I don’t manage hundreds of devices and don’t require remote BIOS access, so I installed libreboot. No, it’s not 100% free, but it does the job well enough. Does it stop everything? No. Does it make my shit a little bit more secure and free? Absolutely.

I like this choice in all my devices, if I’m selecting something, I would like to know that some people smarter than I am are maintaining it, preferably not from the manufacturer. If Samsung decides tomorrow that they will no longer support the S25, all of us are shit out of luck. But what if there is a group of people that wants to merge Android security patches for longer than that? There are custom ROMs for your phone if you want a slimmer, less bloated version of Android. iPhones do not seem to have a choice in that regard. LineageOS supports many phones; I found my sister’s device on it just recently, the manufacturer said it would not support Android 14, and here it is, Android 15 and the latest-and-greatest security patches.

It may sound obvious, but if you have a phone lying around, just try to find if there is a custom ROM like LineageOS available for it. It may just turn an unusable, out-of-date phone into something you can keep in your car, use as a backup if your primary phone breaks, or gift to someone in need of a device.

Yes, I have rambled about phones before. Yes, I have a GrapheneOS device on a Google phone, but to be honest, this phone is not too shit when it comes to repairability. You can actually buy an OEM screen or battery and replace it yourself. Would I call it user-replacable? Hell no, my first try took me 2 hours to replace the screen. It is replacable without thousands of dollars in specialized tools? Absolutely. If you’re technically inclined and can read a manual, you can do it.

In closing

If you read this far, I thank you. Also, I would like to ask you for the following: If you have the option to choose a more free option to use, please consider it. The differences in performance are closing fast, you don’t need to run the latest gadget just because it came out. The difference between iPhone and Android is slim to none, Windows and Linux are quite similar, too. But I implore you: my want for freedoms only makes things better for all. You may not want to hear it, and I understand, but my freedom to choose older/cheaper/more repairable does not take your rights away. Take a minute to investigate your options, and you may find that what you took for the only option is actually a concerted effort to lock you in.