We are continuing with the APC series Building a Free Internet of the Future, our monthly series of interviews with NGI Zero (NGI0) grant recipients and consortium members. Funded by the European Commission, NGI0 supports free software, open data, open hardware and open standards projects. It provides financial and practical support in a myriad of forms, including mentoring, testing, security testing, accessibility, dissemination and more.
postmarketOS is an operating system (OS) primarily for smartphones, based on the Alpine Linux distribution.
It was launched on 26 May 2017 and its source code is under a free/libre licence.
With a large community of volunteer contributors, they develop free and open source software to extend the life of consumer electronics. Their aim is empowering people to have full control of their devices, and they promote a healthier and more sustainable society.
This month we talked with Pablo Correa Gomez, one of the core contributors to postmarketOS, Oliver Smith, a board member, and Clayton Craft, a full-time postmarketOS worker.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
In 2017, postmarketOS declared that it was "aiming for a 10-year life cycle for smartphones." Where do you stand today?
We now support some devices like the Nokia N900 that are much older than 10 years, but there is much work to be done. Every device out there will be 10 years old at some point, and the chances of them continuing to work on our stack remain high. Even if recent focus has been on not-so-old devices (OnePlus 6 or Pixel 3a are "just" around six or seven years old), people in our community are also interested in running postmarketOS on older devices to keep them useful (or for whatever other reasons volunteers have!). As postmarketOS is a full Linux distribution, it allows using old phones not only as phones, but also for more or less everything that could be done with a Raspberry Pi – with an integrated screen and battery.
Although the "10-year life cycle" was a clear and objective measure, we also realised that we did not want to be limited by it. With many phones reaching that milestone, what would happen to them? Should they stop being supported past that landmark? Should they be supported, but receive less attention? Should people stop working on features? Those questions did not have straightforward answers. So we took a stand, and throughout 2024 we discussed in length a new mission for the project. We ended up with a bit more generic statement that still clearly determines our priorities: "postmarketOS develops free and open source software to extend the life of consumer electronics. By empowering people to have full control of their devices, we promote a healthier and more sustainable society".
postmarketOS was always more than just "making phones live for a long time." There's an intrinsic mentality of being respectful of users, and trying to build on patterns that respect people and avoid the attention economy. There is certainly an incredible amount of work ahead to be able to make an impact in a way that the mission is fulfilled. But we believe this is a good way to guide us forward.
postmarketOS is a fully volunteer community. How do you manage to "subsist" in a world dominated by Big Tech, especially in the mobile device operating system sector?
There are a few things that are critical to our success, despite having virtually no money compared to such Big Tech:
- We have heavily invested in easing the work of people contributing not just to postmarketOS, but to the larger Linux mobile ecosystem, by making it easy to get devices ported, building tooling to support people doing development, and endorsing collaboration over a "just works in postmarketOS" mentality. We believe that the only way to be successful is acting as multipliers by collaborating with related projects, and avoid gate-keeping as much as possible.
- We are supported by the GPLv2 License of the Linux Kernel, which forces Big Tech companies to provide us with the basic code for their devices, even if compliance is not always perfect. Life would be a lot harder if everything had to be reverse-engineered from scratch. That is unfortunately the case for most Apple devices. It is also fair to say that there is some alignment between some of the Big Tech policies and ours. Android has sustainability problems that are obvious to everybody, and part of the work of some vendors upstream greatly benefits our community.
- The postmarketOS mission and community are greatly appealing to a lot of people – we now have over 500 different devices to which postmarketOS has been ported, and over 700 contributors in our main repository. We put a lot of effort into highlighting the great work the community is doing, for example, by writing a long blog post at least once a month about all the development efforts that have been going on, listing in detail which improvements were made and who exactly has made them.
Furthermore, we clearly communicate the state of the project. At this point, it is for enthusiasts and hackers, not for people who rely on their phones. With that being said, we are working on more reliability and other improvements needed to make postmarketOS work for people who just want a polished smartphone operating system, and we are slowly getting there with our fast-growing project and community. Even though we do not have an “ETA” to get the project into the hands of less technical people, we do not depend on Big Tech, which in our opinion is clearly a long-term advantage.
Would you like to talk about postmarketOS in the Majority World, which some refer to as the Global South?
We have some contributors and members of the team from the Global South. However, the current nature of our project, for the most part volunteering without any return outside personal joy, is certainly a blocker for a greater adoption outside Europe and the US. We are aware of the good that a project like ours could do in such areas of the world if expanded outside hacker groups. However, for anything like that to work, we would need powerful local communities, or support from entities that could help us bring the benefits to an area that is hard for us to access. This would probably also come attached with a greater professionalisation of the project, maybe some legal entity that could support funding for the benefit of Global South communities. It totally aligns with our mission (to promote a healthier and more sustainable society), but to be able to have a real impact, we cannot do it alone. It is something we would be very willing to work on, if the opportunity would arise.
postmarketOS has benefited from several NGI0 grants (NGI0 Core, NGI0 PET). How does this help you?
NGI0 has helped us immensely with moving critical parts of postmarketOS forward. While postmarketOS is largely a volunteer-driven project, funding from NGI0 allows us to ensure that people working on postmarketOS can have enough time to get critical parts done – such as the recent integration of systemd [a software suite] that was partially funded by NGI0, or the release engineering for major versions that NGI0 has often funded. In addition to very critical parts, funding from NGI0 has also been useful in areas that require very specific technical skills that we just could not find volunteers for, especially within a time frame of months. One example for that is the Collation + i18n support in the musl libc project, which benefits not only postmarketOS, but also upstream musl libc and Alpine Linux projects and the wider free software ecosystem which uses them (for example, through docker/podman containers).
In addition to a financial grant, NGI0 offers a range of support services (security audits, accessibility, mentoring, etc.). Does this help you too?
The support services have been very helpful and it is great that they come with the grants without any extra costs. We have done a security audit that helped us to be confident in the code that was audited. Of course we try to write secure code with minimal attack surfaces where we can, but having a third party review it for potential security holes is incredibly valuable. Besides that, we also did an accessibility audit, were able to talk to translation experts and had FOSS [free and open source software] business and legal consulting. We also took part in diversity and inclusion meetings that were very helpful in, for example, code of conduct-related discussions, and where we learned that when other people ask them how to grow their communities and find new maintainers, they actually use postmarketOS and the way we did it there as an example. We have also received FOSS-friendly business and legal consulting, which was very helpful to give us a bit of direction and perspective on how other people grow their projects. A few times it's been a bit hard to follow up with providers of those services unless it’s directly done through NLnet, so we might benefit even more if those services were a bit more available.
What are your next big steps?
Throughout the last year and a half we have focused on growing our community and outreach. We have also started increasing our work on planning and executing with a longer-term vision in mind. One of our main goals for the mid term will be to increase the reliability of our system, so we can start reaching out to new groups of less technical people. We are also starting to see an explosion in the amount of events where postmarketOS is represented, be it by the team (when organisers reach out to us), or when community members go and present about us. This is something that fills us with joy, and that we want to continue moving forward.
The floor is yours. Do you have a message you'd like to pass on?
Thank you everybody that has supported postmarketOS and all the Linux stack specifically tailored to phones. From our donors in Open Collective to low-level musl libc hackers, Alpine, UIs like Plasma Mobile, SXMO, Phosh, GNOME Mobile, and anything in between. Building a complete piece of software for it to work in one of the most complex pieces of hardware that exists, phones, and doing it using it exclusively FOSS is an extraordinary feat. We all share this success. We wouldn't be able to achieve this without the rest of the community. Thank you for your work!
Xavier Coadic is a consultant for the NGI0 consortium, and a free/libre open source software activist with 15 years of experience in free open source cultures and communities (software, data hardware, wetware, policy makers and political groups, research and development).