Slashdot Mirror
G2 Detects When Rooted and Reinstalls Stock OS
RandyDownes writes "And you thought the Droid X's kill switch was bad. HTC and T-Mobile's new G2 can detect when it's been rooted and responds by reinstalling the factory OS. This seems like a violation of the Apache license Android is licensed under and is especially ironic given Eric Schmidt's recent statement about not requiring carriers to give consumers the option to install Google's own version of the OS. Schmidt called it a violation of the principles of open source."
Update: 10/06 17:47 GMT by S : As readers have noted, the G2 is not from Motorola. Here's a better source, and here's the XDA Developers thread discussing the issue.
...battle for control over our mobile devices. Fuck it, I don't care anymore. The war certainly won't be won in its current direction. It needs fundamental change at the consumer level.
This is why I recently bought a n900 after reviewing the current situation and comparing many devices with articles, reviews, asking friends or colleagues about their models. Albeit with a (around) 450 € sticker price it was not cheep. But out of the box I do have to worry about changing carriers (if I do), needing to get root (if I want to), app prices, and app licensing.
Oh did I mention it has been out for little over a year and is stable and has a really cool community constantly building open source apps ?
http://maemo.org/
This and a number of other consumer ills I think can be reduced to a single statement: "The consumer is not the customer"
-- "Oh. This guy again."
You get what you pay for.
If you really want to have an "open" device, you should have supported the various open hardware platforms that eventually failed because of your lack of support.
You can't really complain that you don't have choices when you made no effort to support the good choices that you had.
Oh my fucking god man, whaaa whaa whaa. I really try to support open source, but THIS is the fucking reason why open source isn't more widely supported. Everyone developing for them says they're the best thing ever, and then when users don't adopt, the developers blame the USERS.
WTF? Did you not ever take a business class in your life? Consumers do what they want, and you either provide them with what they want or you get left behind. If you don't see it that way, you will also get left behind. If consumers don't pick up your device, its YOUR FAULT.
If the CEO of a poorly performing company came out and said "We lost money this year because consumers refuse to support us." that CEO would get fucking FIRED.
This mentality upsets me so much, because every year I download Ubuntu and give it a shot. I *want* it to be awesome and I want to switch. But every time I have some menial little issue that ends up taking a week to sort out, and I give up. Then, when I mention that experience to people who strongly support linux, they say it was my fault. That "All you have to do it edit .asoundrc. If you won't RTFM we can't help you.", as if you just click "edit" and its done. No one on the forums could tell me *what* I needed to do in the editor (and I searched, and asked nicely - I know how to ask things on forums) and I *tried* reading the manual, and reading everything else I could find, but all I was trying to do was get my media center to properly mix the audio for 5.1 channel surround! In windows you just check a box. In linux, I spent a week on it and then gave up.
As long as people keep developing crap software and then blaming it on the user, they will never succeed. That said, I am still excited for Ubuntu 10.10. Just like I was for 7.10,8.4,8.10,9.4,9.10, and 10.4. Lets hope *this* time its money...
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Why should that not be (felony) violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?
Ditto about other stuff being written here...
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
and how long until verizon locks you out of the android market and substitutes the v-cast market instead? soon. the only reason the carrier relinquished a little control to google, allowing their phones to make google money through search, is because they had nothing to compete with the iphone.
now that they have android, watch the noose tighten. carriers just can't stop trying to squeeze a dime out of every aspect of the mobile web. they'll never allow themselves to be relegated to being a pipe.
of course, they don't get that they really don't have android. google sold it to them like "look, it's open source, how much control can we really exert over you?". ha ha. thousands of google employees that are infinitely familiar with the source code means more than they think.