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Android's Success a Threat To Free Software?
Glyn Moody writes "Two years after its launch, Google's Linux-based Android platform is finally making its presence felt in the world of smartphones. Around 20,000 apps have been written for it. Although well behind the iPhone's tally, that's significantly more than just a few months ago. But there's a problem: few of these Android apps are free software. Instead, we seem to be witnessing the birth of a new hybrid stack — open source underneath, and proprietary on top. If, as many believe, mobile phones will become the main computing platform for most of the world, that could be a big problem for the health of the free software ecosystem. So what, if anything, should the community be doing about it?"
I don't see the problem.
> So what, if anything, should the community be doing about it?
Ummm... writing good, foss apps to do the things you need/want to do? Seems obvious.
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Gonna go out on a limb here and say "Develop apps for Android."
Worse, ifeffortsto enable Android apps to run on distros like Ubuntu succeed, then we may see closed-source software being used on the free software stack there, too. Ironically, Android's success could harm not just open source's chances in the world of mobile phones, but even on the desktop.
Huh, that's a really funny statement. I thought one of the biggest barriers to Linux on the desktop was the fact that we couldn't entice proprietary manufacturers (from device drivers to bulky enterprise solutions) to also release and thoroughly support a Linux distribution of their software. Hell, every other week we're bitching about the sad state of gaming on Linux or sound on Linux and let's just face it: you need to improve that before people will buy Linux for that purpose. And now we're concerned that proprietary will be released on Android? And it might challenge Linux? Good. If it can manage that, good for it. I assure you that if proprietary manufacturers see Android as a viable release alternative to Windows CE, Symbian, etc, that is when you're going to see everyone embrace an open source product.
And really, what's wrong with that? The people who wanted to release their open source software still are but now the people that want to release their closed source software still are and can. And the best part about it is everyone's using an open source stack to support their application.
I don't know about you but if you could replace Windows with Linux on the desktop even though 99% of the apps running on it were proprietary, I would be much more happy with the state of things.
We need both FOSS and proprietary software. Give both of them what they want like options to achieve their goals and then you will have a truly great product that helps the community and humanity as a whole in utilizing computers.
My work here is dung.
"The community" could come up with a very restrictive license that doesn't allow that sort of thing, which Google et. al. will just not use anyway.
The point of open source and free software is that it's supposed to be better than proprietary. It's supposed to win on merit, not restrictive licensing or "the community" trying to force things.
This is not news in any way. Apple's platforms (Mac and iPhone) have been successful for precisely the same reason. They exploit open source for the infrastructure (OS and developer tool chain) and layer proprietary applications on top for profitability.
Its like saying that Linux is a threat to feee software because you can run commercial applications. Surley the key to it taking off is having a mix of free and commercial applications.
It still means that more people is using open source. Maybe more important, is what is underneath, you can easily switch propietary "front" apps for open alternatives, but not so easily change whats running below them. And the advantages that give you that basement (probably more secure, auditable, even you could modify it, etc) will increase trust in open source to the ones still reticent to use it.
Could be nice that all Android apps to be open source, but buiding a mixed ecosystem around it brings more people to the party anyway.
I'm sick of those fundamentalists. What could be healthier than an open source platform without vendor lock-in, that anybody can use to generate some income. I love what has been produced in the spirit of open source and nobody won't take this away. But the everything must be free mentality is a bigger threat than people making money by selling software in binary form for a living. Good software means months of work and pizza and coffee need to be paid for. And experience has shown that at max 0.5% of people pay for something that they can get for free easily and legally.
Commercial software is what leads to open source software in many cases. When someone makes an app that you have to pay for, someone else will write one that you don't. MySQL was not first, it was the answer for those that couldn't afford Oracle, DB2, etc.
Most open source programmers enjoy programming. One will see a need and fill it with their own project. The more people that want that need filled, the more projects and higher quality projects we will see.
And nothing of value was lost?
If I'm a developer trying to write a major app - say a wordprocessor or an operating system - I have a huge job ahead of me and hence, a good incentive to recruit the help of the FOSS community by opening my code. Likewise, the community has a stronmg incentive to help.
A lot of "Apps", however, tend to be fairly simple, verging on the trivial, single-purpose applications, and a good one might owe more to being a cool idea rather than a clever and intricate bit of coding. There's less incentive to share (and less incentive for the community to help).
Of course, the community still gains from the increasing popularity of the underlying, open source OS and the "big tools" (like WebKit).
I suspect that open source will continue to be better at systems & infrastructure stuff (where the target audience is programmers or other nerds) than user-facing apps. Nerds aren't good at writing software for non-nerds.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
They're far too small, limited, have terrible human-input interfaces, too small screens and puny batteries.
Small: Asset
Limited: The new OMAP chips are pretty ballsy, and can do HD video output... and are coming to a phone near you
Terrible human-input: Bluetooth, baby. Bluetooth.
Too-Small screens: HDMI would fit on a phone just fine.
Puny batteries: You plug it in when you're doing heavy lifting.
I suspect that cellphones WILL become the dominant computing device for a time. Not least because it's much cheaper than buying a PC and a cellphone, and cellphones are fairly ubiquitous already... and becoming more literally so.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Look, as much as all this Cathedral and Bazaar/Chaos crap sounds good in some righteous fight against the man, I've been using and helping to build Linux since 1995 and what we have sorely needed is some form of direction and vision. OS X has made such massive leaps and bounds with a relatively small number of developers because they have a solid vision and goal steering their efforts. We just flail about and continually eschew any sort of cohesive goal. It shows. Linus doesn't want to take control and everyone wants to claim that it is not needed, but amazingly the Kernel itself requires this type of management and oversight... and it is always the most progressive part of the whole. But what good is the best kernel without a supporting structure? It's time to either take the bull by the horns, or step back and allow a company like Google or Canonical to do it. Canonical and Ubuntu have floundered and have not come out as that entity even with the success in interest they garnered (like Red Hat before it), so it's time for another to try. I could care less who finally does it, just get it done!
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I did (vote with my wallet). Maemo lost. Google managed to get a provider that actually has coverage where I live to sell an android device. Maemo? Not so much. When ideology collides with the real world, sometimes the real world wins. I hope this changes in the future, because I didn't have any preexisting bias for android, but I can use my android phone NOW, rather than wait for the nebulous future when the planets line up just right to make devices available that run software which fits my ideology perfectly. OTOH, I can't say I have much to complain about with android so far. I've been able to run only Free (as in speech) apps to get the functionality I desire, and I can write my own using the SDK that's available. Seems like a fine situation to me.
Don't kid yourself. Without Stallman and his supporters there would have been no FSF, no GCC to compile free programmes, no utilities to facilitate the creation of the Linux Kernel and you would be paying top dollar for your Microsoft OS and applications. Before the Linux Kernel came along if you wanted in to UNIX you had to fork out serious money. Stallman, the FSF and Linux (that's why he wants you to call it GNU/Linux see, so that you get to know the history) changed all that in a fundamental way.
So sure, go ahead and say you are sick of those fundamentalists. What have you done to make it all happen? Nothing.
And incidentally, nobody is saying you shouldn't charge for software you write.
There is a distinct threat to FOSS in smartphones; but it isn't android, or even the largely proprietary apps running on top of it. Heck, on the software side, having a FOSS OS as a rapidly rising contender is at least as good, if not better, than things have ever been on the PC side. Especially since, if the underlying OS is FOSS, and that is what commercial applications are developed on, it is quite easy to compromise only as much as needed in order to run particular proprietary applications(compare to say, the situation with Linux, where most proprietary apps are for windows, so if you need to use just one, you either have to pray it works with Wine, or dual boot, or virtualize.) If both proprietary and FOSS apps are running on a FOSS base, you can freely pick and chose.
The problem is the hardware, and the carriers.
With PCs, there is nothing(aside from certain driver issues) stopping you from running whatever you want on your hardware. And, with a bit of informed shopping, you can usually get a desirable hardware configuration without too much trouble. With phones, though, the manufacturers and carriers have their hooks into the process much more deeply. While the implementations have often been pretty weak, allowing a variety of hacks, proprietary components explicitly targeted against the user are ubiquitous(SIM locks, anyone?) and even the FOSS components are apt to be more or less tivoized on most handsets that you can actually buy.
I'd say that smartphone software is shaping up to be freer than PC software; but smartphone hardware is far closer to dystopian trusted computing/Palladium/NGSCB stuff than PC hardware is.
I strongly disagree. Open Source has mainly been brought forward by pragmatists as Linus with a sense to attract high level software industry supporters. The fundamentalists were, the last time I checked, still working on GNU/Hurd. ;)
Or support the N900 instead of the Android. It's not a totally open stack, but it's much more so than Android, and the apps also tend to be direct ports of Linux OSS. And the whole thing is less locked down to begin with.
I'm writing from one.... the "app stores" are just debian repositories, it's really an open platform... and the GUI is awesome...