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  • Paid OS AphyOS by Apostrophy, on top of GrapheneOs ?

Carbon14

Hi there, AphyOS has been discussed recently in the Media channel on Matrix if you scroll up to 9 January.

GrapheneOS is open source and permissively licensed to allow for this sort of thing.

a year later

https://www.apostrophy.ch/

When I search for "AphyOS" in the forum, I only find 2 threads. Is there an exchange with AphyOS or contributions from AphyOS?

Or does AphyOS have no contact with you at all?

    matchboxbananasynergy

    Apostrophy is a bespoke OS-level implementation integrated, in partnership, with an Original Equipment Manufacturer smartphone.

    Obviously you're not a part of their team so you can't give an accurate answer to this, but is it fair to take the "partner OEM" here to mean Google? Or something else? I find it strange they aren't really disclosing that, especially when I was under the impression that an OEM for Graphene was a difficult thing.

    And shouldn't they be disclosing the source code, or am I misunderstanding the licensing?

    Are they a real/genuine product, or just another scam?

      Dumdum Obviously you're not a part of their team so you can't give an accurate answer to this, but is it fair to take the "partner OEM" here to mean Google? Or something else? I find it strange they aren't really disclosing that, especially when I was under the impression that an OEM for Graphene was a difficult thing.

      No, it means Punkt, which has a MediaTek device that their OS ships with. It is hard for GrapheneOS to find an OEM that can produce a device meeting our requirements. If we wanted to just have "GrapheneOS" hardware out, we could do that with ease. The difficult part is that hardware coming anywhere even remotely close to matching Pixel's hardware security.

      Dumdum And shouldn't they be disclosing the source code, or am I misunderstanding the licensing?

      No. GrapheneOS is intentionally permissively licensed (overwhelmingly MIT licensed) precisely so people can take the code and make a closed source fork if they so wish. All the license requires is that attribution is provided, not that they publish their modified source code.

      Dumdum Are they a real/genuine product, or just another scam?

      I wouldn't call it a scam. It's a very dubious product, though. They're overcharging for a MediaTek device ( a device which doesn't meet our criteria) with a likely out-of-date fork of GrapheneOS with weird frills added to it, and they charge to use the OS itself. From people who have looked into their various services or "suite", I hear it's pretty basic and nothing to write home about.

      As long as they're not making any dishonest claims by either saying they are GrapheneOS (they don't) or making security or privacy claims that are untrue (to my knowledge, they don't), I don't see a problem with it. Would I ever recommend people use it? Personally, no.

        matchboxbananasynergy GrapheneOS is intentionally permissively licensed (overwhelmingly MIT licensed) precisely so people can take the code and make a closed source fork if they so wish. All the license requires is that attribution is provided, not that they publish their modified source code.

        Isn't the kernel GPLv2?

          It's a fine marketing ploy using the notoriously political and absurd statement of "digital sovereignty". e/OS/ uses the same nonsense to attract users to its scam.

          Nothing to get excited about.

          matchboxbananasynergy I suspect overall they owe their users some source code. But some companies forget that until pressed (I think I remember that it took a lawsuit in the case of LinkSys, though they eventually adopted a better open-source stance).