Interview with Merlijn Wajer (Maemo Leste) – NGI Assure beneficiary

Can you introduce yourself and your project?
My name is Merlijn Wajer. I am from the Netherlands, where I studied computer science in Amsterdam. I currently reside in Eastern Europe. By day, I am a contractor for the Internet Archive (archive.org); by night, I have worked on Maemo Leste since its inception in 2017.Maemo Leste is a mobile operating system (like Android and iOS). Still, it is community-developed, open source, and built entirely on open (software) foundations, which stem from Nokia’s “Maemo” project. We have built upon Nokia’s work by modernising the project and creating open-source software for the parts of Nokia’s Maemo that were not open-source.

Nowadays, Maemo Leste is pretty usable, and I use it on a daily basis without relying on any other phone or smartphone operating system. At the same time, there are still many things that we need to work on or are simply missing. Still, we are dedicated to pushing ourselves to make Maemo Leste an even greater alternative mobile operating system.

What are the key issues you see with the state of the Internet today?
I can identify four key issues:

📌 The majority of mobile devices are controlled by a duopoly of Google and Apple, who, by the nature of a duopoly, mainly control how users access the Internet on their mobile devices.

This has an immensely negative effect on the Internet as these two companies can push for poor new technologies/standards that lead to more lock-in (Google’s Web Environment Integrity attempts at remote attestation to control further how users access the Internet) or actively harm the privacy of the users (CSAM which would scan the contents of the user’s phones against their will using inept technology).

📌 The “App” ificiation of our digital lives.

There are many more side effects of this duopoly – many private companies offering services to users will only provide users with an “app” that runs on either system of the duopoly and offer no other way to access their services – for example, some banks require the usage of a mobile banking “app” to access their Internet (web browser-based) banking. This “app” ification is an insult to the users’ ability to choose an alternative platform (like Maemo Leste, or otherwise) – I experience this very frequently, as companies assume everyone has a smartphone with Android or iOS, period. This is a significant downgrade from accessing the web from a platform and browser of the user’s choice. The “app” ification of (digital) services also unfortunately means that users usually have to run closed source (non-FOSS) code on their devices – in some sense, this is analogous to proprietary javascript from websites, but many websites still function pretty well without a lot of proprietary javascript. We’re back to running a proprietary operating system on our hardware just to run more proprietary software to access services that now provide no other way to access them.

The centralisation of services on the Internet is a significant problem, both due to the lock-in effects (which the EU is attempting to tackle with the Digital Markets Act) and the reliance on a few external parties’ services to be able to (safely) communicate at all. If WhatsApp, or any other major platform, decides to remove a user from their platform today, how will the user keep in touch with their social contacts only on WhatsApp? And where would the user appeal the decision? The lock-in of such a platform and the resulting reliance on these platforms as users is a very unhealthy balance. The amount of power that the modern Internet has given to a small number of companies presents significant privacy challenges – even if messages are end-to-end encrypted, the metadata (who is talking to who at which point) is usually not, and having a central party control access to this data comes with its challenges. In short, forcing these systems to be more federated or decentralised (like XMPP) would be a significant improvement (most of the successful and long-lasting parts of the Internet have been decentralised: e-mail, the World Wide Web, and so on).

📌 Legislative challenges to our right to privacy:

This final point doesn’t necessarily touch so much on the current state of the Internet but more on the current state of our legislative branches: the repeated attempts by significant parts of the EU to weaken or outright ban end-to-end encryption is incredibly worrying. The current “Chat Control” proposal has been put on hold again. Still, if such a draconian law were ever passed, the negative impact of the law on the Internet would be severe, especially with other pre-existing laws in some countries. The Netherlands, for example, has already created a surveillance “dragnet” (which was rejected by the population in a referendum, but the government ignored the outcome of the referendum), which allows for indiscriminate mass surveillance of Dutch citizens online. If end-to-end encryption were weakened, this would significantly enhance the pre-existing privacy-adverse law.

How does your project contribute to correcting some of those issues?
The duopoly of Google and Apple is so strong at this point that I don’t believe that the solution to this problem will be of a (purely disruptive) technical nature. Nevertheless, Maemo Leste aims to provide an alternative to users who do not want to be at the mercy of either Google or Apple – the user can decide to run Maemo Leste on their device instead (assuming the device is supported by Maemo Leste, of course).

Maemo Leste makes decentralised platforms and privacy-enhancing technology an integral part of the operating system:

📌 Maemo Leste is based on Debian-derivate Devuan, which ensures that there is a big community supporting its underlying software foundations;

📌 We offer Tor (see torproject.org) integration and the option to easily use Wireguard. Users can update their devices using our Tor hidden service;

📌 Our default browser comes with tracker-/ad-blocking by default (our browser is still in development) – users can also install other browsers, such as Firefox, with no limitations;

📌 We support decentralised/federated protocols such as XMPP (and, to a lesser degree, Matrix and IRC) as class citizens. Maemo Leste also supports other (centralised) chat protocols but integrates them in a single piece of software, so one does not need to use “apps” from their respective vendors, which often track users;

📌 Maemo Leste puts the user in control and does not artificially limit or track the user in what they can and cannot do;

📌 Maemo Leste is also (as mentioned earlier) FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), so anyone can inspect what the operating system does, modify it to their liking, or otherwise submit improvements.

What do you like most about (working on) your project?
What I like the most is that I now can use Maemo Leste daily for my (smart)phone needs. When we started the project in 2017, we did not believe we would make as much progress as we have.

However, we humbly realise we still have a long way to go.

Where will you take your project next?
We will keep working on the real-time communication stack for the next few months, but we hope to start supporting more devices, especially more modern devices. This will require us to rework a few core parts of our operating system to accommodate better devices with only a touchscreen and no physical keyboard. We also hope to extend our user base by porting Maemo Leste to more devices.

How did NGI Assure help you reach your goals for your project?
The NGI Assure funding from NLnet helped us focus on developing and extending our real-time communication stack and the list of supported devices that Maemo Leste runs on. As a result, we have integrated XMPP and Matrix into our operating system using the Telepathy communication framework while also improving the Telepathy framework. As a direct result of the funding, we hired a few contractors to help us work on our project, and we’re very thankful for this opportunity.

Do you have advice for people who are considering applying for NGI funding?
This is a difficult question. I have tried to answer the questions in the guidelines very clearly and elaborate on our project’s positive impacts.

Do you have any recommendations to improve future NGI programs or the wider NGI initiative?
The NGI initiative could support federated and decentralised technologies beyond user-facing software. If the program could help get ordinary users on platforms such as XMPP or Matrix, I believe that would significantly improve our privacy and security. This could be done by supporting companies that provide federated services or otherwise popularise those protocols. Another way to further this goal would be to push for making it easier to contact a company (or an agency of the government) using decentralised technologies such as XMPP – which would be much better than the status quo where companies offer using “WhatsApp” as a direct communication line to their support staff.