Email from NLnet on 2024-12-31:
Dear Julian,
you applied to the 2024-10 open call from NLnet. We have some questions regarding your project proposal Find My Freedom Phone.
You requested xxx euro, for a total of 256 hours of effort. Can you provide some more detail on how you arrived at this estimate? Could you provide a breakdown of the main tasks, and the associated effort?
What do you mean precisely by a Freedom Phone? Does this include Linux-based OS-es like postmarketOS? What platforms would this software run on?
In what programming language and under what license would you write and release this software?
The whole effort (and its unique selling point of not having to configure) hinges on the willingness of an OS to integrate this rather dangerous functionality ("wipe my device with an SMS" sounds very much like "give root to strangers"). Building something into other peoples software without strong buy in will not happen. Is there any interest (or even better commitment) from any existing OS so far that if this were to be built, they would integrate it?
Have you done any user research how users feel about their phone emulating Big Tech behaviour (e.g. "calling home" without their consent)?
If someone takes out the sim card from a stolen device, what happens?
What is the precise problem you intend to solve for whom? Is there specific new functionality you would develop, or is your focus really only on OS integration?
Why not contribute any missing functionality to FMD or UnifiedPush (or Phonetrack [1] or LocateMyDevice [2]), or otherwise share effort with these other efforts - rather than develop something else? For instance, the server components seem completely reusable. Have you discussed this with them?
[1] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack [2] https://github.com/xfarrow/locatemydevice ...