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Device donation

Added by Karl-Philipp Richter over 4 years ago

Hi,
I have an old smartphone that is only lying around for years. Would it be of any use for the development of replicants? I'd give and send it to you for free. It's a rather unpopular model from 2012 ONN V8 targeting the Chinese market, https://www.imei.info/?imei=866508010054851 is the only information I can provide.

I didn't find any information about this subject in the wiki. An addition in the contribution and donation sections would be most welcome.

Best regards,
Kalle Richter


Replies (3)

RE: Device donation - Added by Kurtis Hanna over 4 years ago

Hello Kalle,

Thanks for the offer for the device! We currently aren't interested in targeting the device that you have available. I just created a device donation page as you suggested and added an initial list of devices we are looking for: https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/DonateDevices We'll be adding to the list soon. Thanks again for your willingness to contribute!

Cordially,
Kurtis

RE: Device donation - Added by Karl-Philipp Richter over 4 years ago

Hello Kurtis,
Thanks for your reply and the page.

During my search for alternative uses of the phone, I stumbled over a lot of initiatives collecting devices for recycling (e.g. https://www.handysammelcenter.de/ and https://www.handysfuerdieumwelt.de/), mostly based in Germany, but that shouldn't matter. I was wondering whether it makes sense to ask for an alternative to recycling the collected phones and allow development of replicant and other projects with them instead. Prerequisite is the agreement of the donor of the phone to be used for development and the promise of the phone OS project (and it's contributors) to delete any data accidentally left on the phone before using it for development and taking care of proper recycling after it's no longer used. That means that a separate collection has to be established, but I think it's feasible.

Afaik it comes down to an initial question to the organisations collecting phones which I can take care of. If one comes back positive, for you as a project it means efforts in communication with the organisations and development of policies and processes. The tradeoff of having more phones easily might be still too high. The process could however be a template for other FOSS phone software projects and contribute far beyond the scope of replicant. Therefore I'd like to get you opinion on this idea. Hopefully, you can forward this into the right channels if you think it makes any sense at all and that it's worth investing time into.

Best regards,
Kalle

RE: Device donation - Added by Kurtis Hanna over 4 years ago

Hello Kalle,

Yes, I think it would be great if a recyclying company were interested in donating phones to projects like Replicant instead of recycling them. I don't have a lot of faith that they will want to do this though, since they make money from recycling phones. If you find an organization that would like to donate phones to our project, I'm sure that we would be interested in creating policies and procedures related to obtaining the devices. Let us know if you find any interest.

Cordially,
Kurtis

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