Originally published at: Petition for LG to open-source its phones after closing up shop | Boing Boing
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They’d end up selling it to the highest bidder instead.
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In the future, you’ll jabber into a little box that you carry everywhere and are never separated from it physically, ever. But that’s in the future.
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While I agree with the idea I think there is more to this than just doing it:
On the LG Developer website you can obtain unlocked boot loaders for some of their older devices. I say some because I have a non-carrier locked G7 for the US market, but the only G7 on the list is for the European market. I doubt that is because of hardware reasons and probably has more to do with contractual agreements than anything else.
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Over in one.
In any case, open-sourcing the software is a totally different conversation to the hardware. There’s a strong case for the former (for security reasons, and because it likely incorporates FOSS already), and that’s immediately useful to all sorts of people.
But the hardware design is a different beast. If LG created a really good, detailed, specific textbook saying exactly how they designed their phones down to the circuit diagrams, that could spur all kinds of great stuff. But that’d be a new body of work in itself, and there’s no reason to think LG would be any good at doing it. If they simply dump all the verilog and gerber and STEP files for a particular model, that’s not even close to the same thing. That info isn’t “source code” that you can use as a starting point, it’s just the specs to make spare parts for one specific phone. And you have to be an LG-like entity to even be able to use most of it.
I’d be more than happy with an unlocked bootloader for my V40.
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