this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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I don't have a precise answer as I'm not from that team, but as a developer I think I have a decent idea as to why, and it's mostly political.
First, I don't think it's necessarily the ability to install Play Services that makes them think it's not FOSS, but that they distribute non-free firmware blobs which are necessary to make practically any modern phone function properly, that's just the unfortunate reality because "we live in a society" that enables it. By that logic, I think they believe the vast majority of running Linux kernels on the planet are not FOSS. GNU would rather have things that are not practical and don't exist today... their stance is not currently realistic in our capitalist society IMO. They hope for things to change, but hope doesn't make change.
I also think some people look down on the Play Services thing merely because they went out of their way to explicitly support it in the OS, and basically nothing else. They disagree ideologically with F-Droid and they don't offer any other app stores by default to my knowledge.
Oh I gotcha. Interesting. I don't follow FSF or GNU or anything, do you know if they tend to be antagonistic toward nonfree devs who still try to be as free as possible? Honestly, I read the Stallman quote about FreeBSD in this thread, and a statement from GNU that acknowledges the impracticality of their philosophy, and I kinda agree with their ethical takes. Except, I also think people should be able to install nonfree software, because otherwise you have a pretty bad dilemma with the word "free."
Ultimately, if they are actively antagonistic toward those who don't share that philosophy, I think that's not great. Sure, free software according to the GNU project may be the only ethical one, but we live in a culture that promotes the exact opposite idea, so why would I be surprised and upset when an otherwise ethically acting person doesn't conform to my own ethical framework, and they go on and create nofree software. I'm still going to get a beer with that person because at the end of the day we probably have common values and how else am I going to sell them the idea free software
Both GNU and GrapheneOS have staunch requirements and will accept no compromises.
This is a situation where their requirements don't align, so they'll never reach an agreement.
GrapheneOS, for example, is also strictly against making the Fairphone line of phones a little more secure because it doesn't meet all of their security requirements
In this case GNU won't certify GrapheneOS as fully open because it includes binaries that aren't open
The FSF is more along your line of improving the situation where they can
Graphene is totally open source, nothing is stopping fairphone from maintaining a port for their phones
GOS did reach out to them in the past, but they couldn't reach a mutual understanding for support regarding hardware level patches for the fairphone 3 I believe. There's a git issue about it
I see no reason the fairphone 5 couldn't have GOS support, sure it's missing some of the security requirements, but fair phone could build the branch and make it public