After a lilttle than 1 year of hard work, I’m very proud to announce that the first fully ungoogled Android smartphone on the market will be ready to ship in next June!
This will be high-grade refurbished smartphones, in limited quantities, so don’t wait to register!
Yesterday, the privacy-focused /e/ mobile ecosystem that we have been developing for one year, has been covered at InfoSec Handbook, with a focus on privacy concerns and on the actual “de-googlisation” of the system.
The author raised some concerns, and concluded that “While /e/ looks promising, it isn’t Google-free by now.”
Several years ago I read about some intiatives to build a “Sovereign operating system”. Quickly I realized that, at the age of Internet, it was a depecrated idea and a total non-sense, and instead I started to talk about the idea of the “Sovereign digital chain”.
This is the end of 2018, and this year has been incredible.
By the end of 2017, I posted a few messages here about my quest for more data privacy, and corresponding plans to “Leave Apple and Google”. At this time, I thought I would just customize an Android ROM a bit and that it would be enough for my use and a few others…
I’m very pleased to announce that we have released a first beta of /e/.
It’s been an intensive development sequence, and I’m very proud of the work that we have accomplished with the modest budget we had. That’s the power of Open Source!
Today, we learned that the European Union has fined Google a record amount of 4.3Bn€, for illegal practises with their Android smartphone operating system.
As some of you will have already noticed, the project has moved to a new web location, and the project is now known as the “my data is MY data” symbol:
I was born in 1973 and got my Master’s degree in Computer Sciences (Systems & Networks) at University of Caen, Normandy in 1997.
In 1998 I created the popular Mandrake-Linux system which was the first Linux distribution to care about ease of use (6 years before Ubuntu actually). Then I co-founded MandrakeSoft which went public in 2001. Mandrake-Linux later became Mandriva Linux with the aquisition of Conectiva in Brazil, it was acquired in 2010 by a Russian Investment fund.
There is a chapter about the early story of Mandrake-Linux and Mandrakesoft, and how we took part of the Linux & Open Source revolution, in this excellent book “Rebel Code” by Glyn Moody (here at Amazon, here at Google Books for a preview). I was also interviewed about Mandrake more recently, at FOSSForce.
Starting from 2007, I’ve developed the Ulteo project, a multi-platform application and desktop delivery solution for corporates, with partners. The project was aquired in 2014 by AZNetwork SAS.
In 2015 I’m working on building a “Startup Factory” with partners, called “NFactory”, launching September 2016. I also have new projects linked to mobile development, Artifical Intelligence and chatbots in my spare time.
I’m generally performant at envisioning and bootstraping new projects from mostly nothing. I’m especially interested in participating in potentially disruptive projects in the software industry (AI…) and/or in the “energy field” (photovoltaics, electricity storage, electric cars).
Since 2016 I’m an Advisor for the CommonSearch: project, a radically transparent search engine for the web.
In 2017 I started /e/, a mobile phone OS and associated web-services with respect of user’s privacy. /e/OS is a fully “unGoogled” Android from the core OS to online services. This is a non-profit project, in the public interest (see the crowdfunding campaign here). Then I created Murena, the company that sells smartphones with /e/OS and the Murena private cloud.
I’m defending the idea that a “Sovereign operating system” is a non-sense in 2019. Instead, all the “digital chain” must be considered, and Open Source is key in those matters. I developed these ideas in a chapter writen for a Springer Book: “Reflections on Operating Systems” (ISBN 978-3-319-97226-8).
Recent press review:
a video discussion at the 2022 Nextcloud Conference
my presentation of /e/OS at the 2022 Nextcloud Conference
– Music (listening, playing guitar, piano & drums, recording/producing) & Arts
– Wine (tasting, producing)
– Physics/Astronomy…
– many others actually 🙂