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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?"
Personally, I'd rather see an open operating system used for all apps. This way people can improve and build upon it and write competing systems easier. That way, if you buy Photoshop/Game/Autocad for Linux, there's a better chance that it will run (or be quickly ported) on a competitor so you don't feel locked to a specific company because you spent thousands on a specific app for a specific job.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Not true.
I am all for commercial and FOSS development because I see it as a win win. The truth is that FOSS can produce very good programs.
Firefox is a great browser.
Thunderbird is a very good email client.
Gimp is a very good graphics program. I will not argue that Photoshop is better but Gimp is much more powerful than Photoshop Elements.
I really like DeeVeeDee for making DVDs is super easy to use.
VLC
Audacity
Adium
7Zip
and on and on.
There is a lot of very good FOSS software out there. Now is there a lot of total crap? You bet but there is a ton of total crap closed source software as well.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.