Announcing the Free Software Foundation fundraising program for Replicant

Over the last few years, we have been asked countless times how one could make a donation to the project. Until very recently, it was not at all possible but thanks to the hard work of the Free Software Foundation team, especially John Sullivan and Zak Rogoff, it is now possible for the FSF to accept donations on the behalf of the Replicant project.

Donations will help us buy new devices and port Replicant to them as well as help us attend free software events to promote Replicant at. Devices donations can be accepted as well but we carefully select the devices we want to work on, based on how much they respect freedom, so we might decline some offers.

You might want to consider making a donation to our project, any amount will help, from the FSF directed donations page for Replicant.
Bitcoin donations are also accepted, at the following address: 13tgjejUJ6NtQVX9HvKz8svdcuWPNwgr5T

We also badly need new developers to help us bring Replicant to more and more devices as well as improve the status of the currently-supported devices. As a group effort, Replicant has better chances to succeed and bring freedom to mobile phone users. We are currently a team of two developers with less and less time to get involved in the project and bring new features. Becoming a developer is not even that hard: we have developer and porting guides available to make it easier for you to get started and we’ll be there to guide you all along. Even non-technical people can help to some extent, covering tasks such as building up documentation or writing announcements for the project if they’re good enough at it.

Please get in touch with us if you’re interested. The best way to start is most likely to get a Replicant-supported device and start hacking on it and if you prove serious enough, we might even use some of the donations money to provide you with a new device to port Replicant to!

Replicant 4.0 0004 images release

The last months have been rather calm for Replicant development, no big changes or improvements were made. That doesn’t mean the project stalled: instead, we added support for some new devices. The previous set of images added support for the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1/7.0 in their 3G versions and we were requested to provide images for the WiFi-only flavors of these tablets as well. Since it only requires very little work, we were able to quickly fulfill that request, even though we couldn’t test it ourselves (you’re more than welcome to spot and report issues about these devices).

However, the biggest part of what motivated us to build and release new images is the support for the Galaxy S3 device in its international GT-I9300 GSM version (not the LTE one or any other country-specific variant). Currently, only graphics acceleration, camera and GPS support are missing (some other features may need non-free firmwares that run on separate chips). A couple of other things are also missing due to technical limitations (NFC, FM radio).

We are still trying hard to bring Replicant to the Goldelico GTA04, but it couldn’t make it to that release either as we still need help bringing a reliable Android kernel to that platform (DM37x).

A more complete changelog is also available, highlighting in details what was changed. Special thanks to the team at CyanogenMod who fixed EXIF in the free Galaxy S2 camera module implementation I wrote but was too lazy to correctly implement EXIF into.

You can download the images from the ReplicantImages page and find installation instructions as well as build guides on the Replicant wiki.