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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?"
it's stallman alarmism. RMS is retarded and lives in a hippie communist world.
It works pretty much like this: Linus wrote Linux, and then a billion people jumped in like "oh cool, I like this and this would be personally enriching to work on." A bunch of people wrote GNOME, because it was personally enriching. Lots of people do this, lots of software is written because we like writing software and can resumé-pad with it. It's economics, really; developers do it because it's fun, or because they're compsci students and actually want to be good programmers, or want experience for their resumé ("unpaid internship" is a bullshit term, it's payment in non-money).
Richard Stallman, on the other hand, started writing Hurd in an effort to dethrone the evil, capitalist pigs trying to sell and keep secret their software. Such evil pigs are a threat to our freedom, and god damnit, their software needs to be forced open or discarded and hammered into oblivion by open source alternatives. All software must be free and any not-free software that doesn't come with a free distribution license and source code is a horrible bane and destructive to humanity.
You see, open source software isn't just one person. It's full of crazy people and smart people, and unfortunately brilliant crazy people as well.
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Google gives Android away for free, but they make money off of your personal information and ad revenues generated by you. You give something up in exchange for Android, even if handset makes do not, so basically you're paying for the OS on your handset through use of the handset. There is a cost to you, even though it is not monetary.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."