Hi everyone,
Those of you on the Telegram channel will see that I’ve been in contact with someone from Necunos about porting B2GOS to their upcoming NC_1 device so that people can order it with B2GOS loaded! https://necunos.com/
I first contacted Necunos in December last year about collaborating with them to ship the NC_1 with B2GOS loaded, as they had recently announced collaborations with Plasma Mobile, LuneOS, Replicant, postmarketOS, Maemo Leste and Nemo Mobile. I quickly got a response expressing their interest in our “interesting and extremely innovative” project and gave them more information about the potential of web technologies in mobile OSes and on the history and current status of FirefoxOS, B2GOS and Servonk.
Necunos have offered to support porting efforts and will provide a device which I can test with. For each NC_1 which they sell with B2GOS loaded they will make a small contribution to our project, the arrangements for which I still need to work out. As far as I know these are the same arrangements as they’ve made with the other collaborating OS projects. Note that my intention for these contributions is to use them to buy development hardware for other contributors but other suggestions are welcome.
My plan is to get b2g48 running on their standard Linux stack following a similar approach to B2G Desktop/Mulet builds. I’ll make appropriate changes to Gaia to remove Firefox branding and any apps which aren’t relevant to the NC_1 (e.g. Phone and SMS/MMS). I obviously won’t be removing anything related to Mozilla’s copyright or the B2GOS team’s credits for the production of B2GOS prior to my port - if anyone from the B2GOS team has any particular concerns about my intentions then please speak up, I definitely don’t anyone to upset anyone with what I plan to do.
I chose to use b2g48 (~FirefoxOS 2.6) because it is already full-featured and I can honestly say that it is a usable OS on a daily basis. I hope that having a new device shipping with B2GOS on it will generate more interest in the project and enthusiasm for people to contribute to projects like Servonk and IceWolf which have an architecture which can be maintained and updated more feasibly than b2g48 (or the post-transition B2GOS).
None of this is confirmed yet, I’m still waiting for Necunos to get back to me with the final details. Nevertheless I hope that this possibility gets a few of you interested in working on B2GOS again. If I’m unsuccessful in my technical efforts then I’ll make the device from Necunos available for someone else to use for porting efforts. At the very least, I hope to have lots of “fun”!
Please ask me any questions (whilst remembering to be nice )
Cheers
Note: also posted to Reddit and the mailing list.