Android Modder Tries To Outmaneuver Google

itwbennett writes "Google recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Steve Kondik, the creator of Cyanogen, a popular souped-up version of Android, asking him to stop distributing applications such as Gmail with his modified software. 'We make some of these apps available to users of any Android-powered device via Android Market, and others are pre-installed on some phones through business deals,' wrote Dan Morrill on the Android developer blog. 'Either way, these apps aren't open source, and that's why they aren't included in the Android source code repository.' Now, Kondik thinks he's found a workaround. He plans to release a 'bare bones' version of Cyanogen without the applications, leaving it to modders to make a backup copy of the Google applications that shipped with their phone for later reinstallation before hacking away at the Android software. 'The idea is that you'll be able to Google-ify your CyanogenMod installation with the applications and files that shipped on your device already,' Kondik wrote."

Comments

Re:Interesting

[IgnoramusMaximus]

1. Intellectual Property means legal ownership of patents, copyrights, etc. Clearly, you know this. You may not like it, but "IP" is the standard term in this discourse and, more importantly, in the law. So you're going to have to get used to it.

All of which are nonsense. True, they might be part of the "legal system" (presently itself a big steaming pile of nonsense, squared) but the fact that some "lawmaker" scribbled something down on paper and called it a "law" is not by itself a sufficient pre-condition to that scribble becoming a logically coherent concept. Which mistake (or more accurately, a religious dogma) is wilfully and universally practised by lawyers, and law worshippers, around the world. "It must be so because it is the law!!" is a cry of every petty, brainless, vindictive autocrat out there.

This has got to the point that I am convinced that many a lawyer would not blink at the idea that if the force of gravity were to be made "unlawful", we would all start floating 3 feet off the ground.

Which is pretty nearly the case with the so-called "Intellectual Property". Not only information itself lacks the required attributes to be "private property", but even the indirect methods of controlling it all lack the barest modicum of scientific backing, like for example a reliable, objective and scientific method of determining which combinations of bits were "derived" from what other combinations of bits, which is the basic pre-requisite to distinguishing uniqueness of information, as in for example in differentiating "patents" and works of art. And that is just exposing the very tip of the veritable mountains of illogic and out-right specious "reasoning" that is employed by various charlatans with vested interest in making "laws" to pad their pockets, logic or fairness be damned.

Re:Interesting

[noundi]

> In FOSS however you can fork the project, which you can't here.

Yes, you're free to fork the Android project and do whatever you want with it, it's under a FOSS license.

What you can't do with the fork is distribute Google's proprietary apps that happen to run on Android: if you need their capabilities you have to write an alternative.
While such applications feature strongly in the "google phone" as usually sold, they have no technical advantage, and there is nothing in the system that prevents alternative applications from taking their place.

Please at least read the summary before you post.

Either way, these apps aren't open source, and that's why they aren't included in the Android source code repository.

Any idiot knows that Andoid is a FOSS project, I was obviously referring to the binaries he distributed without permission.