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An Android Tablet Victory May Be Problematic For Free Software
An anonymous reader writes "Glyn Moody writes at The H that Google's Nexus 7 tablet seems to be in a good position to shake up the market and pave the way for serious Android competition to the iPad. That said, he's worried about the potential downsides to a market full of mostly 'open' devices: 'Such customised systems are likely to be as locked down as they can be – the last thing either manufacturers or companies want is for users to start fiddling with the settings or installing their own software. As a result, the apps that run on such systems are likely to be closed source, since that's the way vertical markets tend to work. Such systems will also expose a persistent problem with the open source development methodology. While big and general projects find it relatively easy to attract interested developers, smaller, more targeted solutions tend not to thrive as free software.'"
Android phones work just fine with respect to OSS.
QED
Discussion closed.
On a tablet.
I'd be pretty satisfied if something like that were freely available. Are there mainstream tablets (and tablet makers) out there that want to be free?
It's pretty easy to consider the desktop PC the greatest "open" device out there, and OSS options on it have always had these problems. But instead of the single device manufacturer locking OSS out, it's component makers not releasing driver sources or specifications.
On the software side, of course the smaller and more focused software solutions are going to get less interest. That's how it's always been, and probably will always be. For every narrow target a project encompasses, there are only X interested users, and Y interested developers. X will always exceed Y.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
[citation needed]
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
For what part? These are all known by everyone. Google doesn't release code for its services, Android is locked behind hardware by manufacturers and yes, Google is really slow in releasing Android source code when they should release it immediately.
IIRC, x86 computers were far more expensive as a percentage of income than these new tablets, and yet free software found plenty of room to thrive. You should Google this 'Linus Torvalds' guy. He wrote some big bit of free software one time.
I'm also not sure why free software would have trouble? Isn't GPL v3 software compatible with Google's marketplace? I own solely iOS devices, so I'm not 100% sure. In addition, there is no developer fee. Seems like Free (and free) software should proliferate on the platform.
Locked down platform? Any vendor would have to have a market or app store comparable in many ways to those already in place by Apple and Google. Otherwise, why buy that tablet?
Yeah, I guess I could RTFA, but this summary in no way makes me want to read it. Was this picked by Soulskill or voted up in the firehose?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
What are the alternatives? iOS or Windows Mobile?
(Please, dont' mention webOS or bootToGecko... I mean: what are the REAL alternatives?)
I know that android is a strange kind of open source system... unlike "traditional" oss projects (e.g., Linux), here a private company is in charge of the main development, and periodically releases the result with an apache license. So? Where is the problem? The community can still start from what's been open sourced and innovate on top of that. Like cyanogenmod or amazon are doing.
So, please, tell my why the rise of an open source project is dangerous to the FREE software.
With Apple as the vanguard, companies have already done their best to lock down every device that is not a PC as tightly as possible during the past 10 years. They want to retain all control and make it illegal to hack, alter or use a device in the way you want even after you've bought it. Ideally, they'd wish to put the same software on all devices and make you pay to unlock features. Now they want to do the same on the PC by forcing developers to use their distribution channels and locking down the boot process.
Bottomline: The damage is already done. We'd need to have customer protection laws to invalidate all these measures and EULAs, but since the industry lobby is fairly strong, this is not going to happen -- at least not in the US.
Android is problematic, yes, but iOS and Windows are far worse.
For what part? These are all known by everyone. Google doesn't release code for its services, Android is locked behind hardware by manufacturers and yes, Google is really slow in releasing Android source code when they should release it immediately.
Whereas I agree on the first two points, I thought that the delay in releasing the Android code was because they had to rewrite some proprietary licensed parts. Certainly this doesn't happen with other Google OS projects like the "go" language, Chromium, etc.
Lol.
You probably missed the news that 4.1 code was released well on schedule, before devices arrived. They have learned from past backlash in this regard.
There is nothing that infuriates me more
[...] a persistent problem with the open source development methodology.
Methodology is the "study of method". The correct word is method
Thanks
Crap article is crap!
Enlighten me here; which particular Google services are violating which open-source licences? Or are you maintaining that they should release all code they ever write? I believe they're still free to make that choice for themselves (and luckily have chosen to be far more open than their peers).
Google's own Nexus products can be trivially unlocked and rooted, by design. But go ahead and blame them for the decisions of other vendors and carriers.
You may have missed how the Android 4.1 source code was fully opened yesterday, before wide release of the system. Wouldn't call that slow, especially considering they're under no obligation to release the Apache-licenced code at all.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
All devices will tend to use more OSS and be less locked down, because it's a potential well in terms of market competition (less investment, longer duration, better image, ...). The gradient may be smooth now (and has been close to 0 in the past) but in the long term the world will be mainly OSS.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Looking at the version history for android (and a few other sources), they contradict you.
I couldn't be bothered to go back before eclair but I'm pretty sure it follows a similar pattern:
Eclair - Release date: October 26, 2009. Source code release date: Nov 16th 2009 (source)
Froyo - Release date: May 20, 2010. Source code release date: Jun 23rd 2010 (source)
Ice Cream Sandwich - Release date: October 19, 2011. Source code release date: November 14, 2011
Jelly Bean - Release Date: not available on a shipping device yet. Source code release date: July 9, 2012
Now I know they didn't release Honeycomb in a timely fashion but gave reasons in advance for that. As that code forms part of the version history for Ice Cream Sandwhich you still have it available to you. However, I don't think you can say that they are particularly slow in releasing their code. And let's look at the definite positive here: they are releasing the source code!.
Kommander Liz, first posting on Wednesday July 11, @05:08PM. Three anti-Google posts since then.
Prognosis: yet another Buston Marsteller shill from the same stable that brought you Bonch, Sharklaser Tech* etc etc.
I'm sure the success of an Open Source OS in the market would clearly doom us all, Preservinig MSFT's monopoly on the other hand is the path to salvation because well, better the devil you know, right?
I work as developer of specialized Enterprise Android applications. So, we order tablets with pure ICS and we put selection of our apps that we need to have there. Yes, for end-users it is "locked", but it is not locked by Google, it is locked by anyone who wants to create such tablet, and it is locked in way end-user demands. If there is demand for whatever style of tablet, however open, there is company that will provide it, Android is fully open-source, there is no limit to customization. And I am not talking about 'jailbreaking" here, Chinese cheap and fully customizable (including hardware!) tablets are completely legal (minus nonsense on rectangular shape in US, etc.).
839*929
Android has already won.
If you look at the history of the PC vs Apple vs Commodore/Amiga, you will remember the remarkable success that cheap, ubiquitous success the PC (and clones -- this is important) had over the others. As countless discussions on the topic were held in those days, people kept citing the superiority of the others. The famous bouncing, spinning sphere... I miss that thing. It was representative of the future of gaming... fast computers and smooth, realistic graphics. (Just took a break to change my screensaver to "Boing" hehe) We, the engineer-technophile types were oblivious to how populations work and behave or what their needs were. We had toy lust and that was just about the extent of it.
Meanwhile, Apple did everything they could to prevent clones of their products and were quite successful, thus ensuring that no market forces other than lust could influence people to buy Apple products. And while that was going on, lots of other product makers out there made awesome little things out there which were also rather proprietary in nature and just didn't get how important that compatibility was... back then, I didn't get it either. My step-father asked me when I bought my first computer from Radio Shack, "what's it compatible with?!" I cluelessly said "itself!" and asserted that I got this thing for me, not for others. This was at a time before modems and networks and all that... data was shared by floppy disk and sometimes even cassette tape. He got it, back then and I didn't... but then again, he was a business-minded guy... (but after he died and I was digging through some of his stuff, I found Wang and some of the other stuff that was fighting for a place in the business market... stuff superior to the DOS systems of the day... even in business, cheap won over awesome/cool/better.)
And here we are again. Apple is still playing its "exclusivity" game and will lose in the end again. It's insanity. If someone makes something that "EVERYONE Wants!" and then try to control it, you will find that it will be hard to stop everyone from having it. Apple wants to be the sole provider of "cool stuff" and all the other makers out there want to play too. Meanwhile, people are picking up more and more android things, buying fewer Apple things and eventually Apple will not be able to support its legal assault on the world defending what it considers to be its turf. (Here's a clue Apple: It's only your turf as long as you can defend it... and that won't be for much longer. I don't care if you're right or wrong because it doesn't matter. People want what you made, but you made it too hard to get it. So what are people to do?? That's right! They give their money to someone else instead of to you and your lawyers. Death to Apple for being stupid and arrogant enough not to figure that out.)
And here we are again... RIM and HP and Nokia among others were the "other guys" making cool things that were kind of like the thing that people wanted but they were "single vendor only" devices and locked down and that's not what people want. Sure, business WANTS to be the sole supplier of a thing, but that's not the way capitalism works in the long term. (And look at RIM... they have been king of the business phone world for a LONG time in some contexts... unstoppable and untoppable.) It's history repeating itself while no one remembers what happened before.
And here we are again... Google is the new Microsoft. They didn't want to make the devices leaving that to the cheap hardware makers making clones... that was their plan. But the phone carriers kept spoiling the fun with their reluctance to release control of and upgrade the software on the devices they sell. That's a big problem for Google and its plans. So now Google has to show people the way... show them what they should expect from hardware vendors (which include phone carriers) and then they will wake up and say "oh, we are losing business to Google... we need to give people more of what they want instead of trying to control the market." Google will NOT offer devices forever. They are just trying to show the market (which is 99.9% the consumers and 0.1% the manufacturers and carriers) the way.
I also missed one in between Froyo and ICS, so for completeness:
Gingerbread - Release date: December 6, 2010. Source code release date: December 18th, 2010. (source)
But on the Nexus 7, all the software required to unlock the device in the stock ROM & the SDK. cd && fastboot oem unlock. Tada!
What a load of Bollocks.
The end.
this glyn moody isn't very intelligent is he......does he know anything on the subject matter, or is he just paid to act a clown in front of a highly technical audience as some kind of weird geek joke?
It's not only Android from Google that is problematic to open source - the whole company is. They take open source and lock it behind internet services and hardware. Hell, they stretch GPL requirements by releasing source code months later and no one does anything.
That is nonsense, their services all have high quality open APIs, mostly very well documented, and mostly for the benefit of open source integration. They don't give you all their code, duh, but they do go out of their way to allow you to integrate with it. If you can already integrate with it, it can't possibly be "problematic."
You're obviously not even a developer if you're spewing that drivel. Now get off my lawn before I turn the hose on you!
They give you APis that you have to pay for. https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview
But the tablets have the driver problem worse than a PC because there's no standard bootloader, input, storage, or display to fall back on to get the system working while specific drivers are being constructed. PC, on the other hand, has the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), which provides a standard bootloader, the PS/2 keyboard and mouse (or a chipset based emulation thereof), an ATA controller, and the VESA display.
Isn't GPL v3 software compatible with Google's marketplace?
Moreover, anybody who has turned on "Unknown sources" to install Amazon Appstore can install F-Droid, which is all free software all the time.
Windows 10 probably won't feel all that much like Windows as we know it
Would that leave an opening for X11/Linux systems the way the introduction of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007 left an opening for OpenOffice.org?
How many FOSS software is Java? Like 1%?
Six years ago, the figure was 18%, and that was before Android came out. More recent figures pin Java around 16%, but they're not specific to free software. In the more recent figures, much of the decline of some languages is due to the rise of Objective-C, but Objective-C is strongly associated with iOS-exclusive projects, which are incompatible with copyleft. Eliminating iOS-exclusive projects would only raise Java's popularity. Who has more recent figures specific to free software?
it's not really about source access even though.
it's about operators like verizon selling devices with locked bootloaders.
in the end it's really pretty much just about operators locking devices currently, while that might change to move to manufacturers who wish to push their own video & etc services. but even then installing 3rd party apk's is pretty easy on every android device still(including kindle fire, but there's some devices that have android but you have to hack quite a bit to get to installing apk's.. but those are quite customized and you're not supposed to even know that they're running android).
if you want to affect the situation do not ever buy device from someone who is also a media sales house, that's a pretty good rule of thumb to this.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
it's not really about source access even though. it's about operators like verizon selling devices with locked bootloaders.
Do you think the Nexus 7 will be locked?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's pretty much what I go through many times when I install software from packages directly from places like SourceForge instead of getting them from the Software "center" of a Linux distro or using apt-get.
The difference between something like Ubuntu Software Center and something like Apple's App Store is the ability to add a third-party PPA in Edit > Software Sources. I was under the impression that a hobbyist developer didn't have to pay $99 per year to run his own PPA.
Android tablet victory makes tech blogger crap his pants. .... grabs that crap smears it all over his iPad touchscreen until this article blurts out.
Methodology is the "study of method". The correct word is method
And "chemistry" is the study of chemicals, but one talks about a particular battery "chemistry". "Christology" is the study of Christ, yet one talks about a particular Christian sect's "Christology". Likewise, a "methodology" appears to refer to a set of related methods.
For a successful consumer device.
1. It needs to be easy to use. Making a program that is easy to use, isn't a technical challenge it is understanding the person and how they will use the product. It is very humbling being on a team making a user friendly product. Because you don't always get your way, and the Tech people don't have much to say. Most Open Source projects don't have the end user interaction to tell you know your idea is completely idiotic, just do it this simple way. Secondly the GNU Model of making a living off of free software doesn't work well with Easy to use software. If it is very easy to use, you are not going to charge for consulting fees.
2. The product needs to be reliable. Open Source Developers make a lot of Rock solid applications. However the Open Nature is to give them more access then less, it is better to have them make a mistake then preventing them excelling. However in a world of Viral Reviews, where you can have someone who has abused the product then rant on how bad it was after he had abused the product, go viral and prevent you from selling an actually good product, you can't allow easy alterations. People are actually smart, however most are inexperienced. As a kid I had to rebuild my OS and all my apps every month or so, because I would mess with settings until the OS became unusable, or just got to a state of no return. For a device such as a Table or a Phone, where you are selling them cheap, and one idiot can make your product look like it was designed by a bunch of monkeys. You need to be sure everything is locked down.
3. Consumer Device must be cheap. You are always competing against price with these devices. R&D of a new product isn't cheap. If you release your code too soon, you will have a bunch of clones in your space, you have taken your Idea's and are able sell their product for cheaper, because you did the R&D for them.
4. The device needs to be new. You got 1 perhaps 2 years to sell a product before it becomes a dinosaur. People will be using the product for perhaps 4 years.
Too keep development time at the correct pace, it is often better for you hire developers to do the work, then hire some, and hope for a rag tag team of volunteers to help out. While this in itself doesn't preclude product from being Open Source it does however, gives the company hiring the developers, intensives to hold on to their IP, unlike other projects where you have a team of community developers and closing the source is much more of a complicated process.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The trend in Android has been, up to now, in the right direction.
For example, the Android Open Source Project originally did not have a development platform build target or reference hardware. Now it does. That means you can take the entire Android Open Source Project and built it and run it, instead of having to "root" a commercial device and port Android to that device before you can start playing with Android on real hardware.
It is in Google's interest to make Android progressively easier to port because Google wants faster and more-consistent updates to Android across all the OEMs using Android. A vibrant and useful AOSP is important to that goal.
Moreover, when faced with a competitor using the Android Open Source Project to build a competing platform and support a competing ecosystem, Google did nothing to thwart AOSP, or to make it harder for Amazon to use AOSP.
Android is partly-open because Google uses a suite of applications and services that are not open source to create commercial Android products with the Google Logo, and OEMs and carriers add their own software to products. There may be room in the market for a more-open mobile OS that isn't tied to big e-commerce ecosystems. Tizen might be one such system, and Jolla might bring Meego back. If those systems prove to be more open, and under less pressure to provide exclusivity to their sponsors, they could turn out to provide truly open, hackable communications devices.
Open communications devices, with open hardware and software, are important because they would enable communications privacy, among other qualities.
I wrote parts of this stuff
Locked down platform? Any vendor would have to have a market or app store comparable in many ways to those already in place by Apple and Google
http://www.wimm.com/
Yes, manufacturers are doing this. Yes, they are locking down the device, and yes, GPLv3 is incompatible with such a platform.
Palm trees and 8
Not Apple; Nintendo, Sony, Sega, etc. were the pioneers of locking down consumer computers. Before Apple was even a company, people were talking about computation being sold as a utility -- you would only rent access through a terminal to a mainframe.
Palm trees and 8
But does he dine at the Y?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
pretty much all my android phones / tablets where delivered locked , unlocking rooting information readily available on the web , my devices are all unlocked rooted rommed and i'm playing around AOSP / compiling from sources , although i'm an amateur and there are much nicer roms out there.
the thing is it's just perfect the way it is , Users get a phone they cant easily break (non root locked phones) and enthusiasts get to play around with their hardware , what's wrong with this ? , now locked/crypto bootloaders i will never buy , this i totally frown upon , it's bad practices better left to the other guy
There really hasn't been a low end of the tablet market for Apple to worry about, because all of the cheap tablets sucked.
True, the Chinese no-name tablets sucked, as did things like the Archos 7 Home Tablet, but what sucks about the Kindle Fire? I see the Nexus 7 as a more direct replacement for the Kindle Fire.
....if you have more than 100 queries a day. You conveniently left out the part where it is indeed free if you have less than 100 queries per day. Maybe not ideal, but don't try to paint a misleading picture.
I'm not sure what lesson you drew from the Amiga (which was definitely killed by bad [un]management, not because it was closed (which it wasn't) or even overly expensive), but I agree with the general sentiment that Open (which currently equals Android) will win in the long run. It will win on price and volume and being "good enough". Here's an interesting graph ("The Rise and Fall of Personal Computing") which I have not verified in any way. Look at the slope of android vs the apple products. That to me says "android will win in a couple of years".
This assumes that Apple will continue to be AAPL and position themselves as selling exclusive high-end products, meaning they'll try to keep margins very high while refusing to play in some markets on pure principle (like the 7" tablet form which IIRC Jobs didn't want)
What we can expect is ever more litigation from AAPL as the balance of power starts shifting. Perhaps in two years we'll have have a more or less clean split between ios android and win8. In the end though, the march of Commoditization is relentless, and it favors cheap-and-open, neither of which describes MS and Apple.
I've actually been thinking that the phone form factor as we know it today may well go the way of the dodo in the future. Who really makes calls any more? Maybe that Galaxy Note is a transitional form to a bigger device ("tablet") which CAN make calls but is really optimized for reading/dictating. Heck, in the future what's to say that your speech won't be recognized into text or phonemes from text AND speech alike, burst over an IP channel and then synthezied -- possibly in "your voice" -- on the other end. But I digress.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I look at the home screens of my Galaxy S2 where I place the icons of the apps I use most. I see some stock Android/Samsung apps plus K-9 Mail (OSS), Cool Reader (OSS), Jota Text Editor (OSS), KeePass (OSS) and other 15 closed source apps. Among them I use regularly Dolphin HD and il Meteo, Chrome sometimes, the others less often. I use the four OSS apps very often but not as much as Dolphin HD.
So based on my limited experience open source is doing well enough on Android, but I remember using only open source programs on Windows years ago, before switching to Linux. Mobile is apparently more closed than desktop but let's give it some time to grow. Windows applications were much more closed in the '90s before people started rewriting them as OSS. Then we got the web, which is basically a frontend to closed sourced backends. Mobile starts from there: most mobile apps are fat clients to remote services and in many cases there is little incentive to open source them.
So I think that there will eventually be more general purpose open source mobile applications but we'll also have many more closed source apps than we have on the desktop.
I'll second you on the Motorola Xoom. Running 4.1 on the Xoom is amazing. It was an expensive tablet (Not as expensive as an iPad), but well worth it. If I had to do it again and the Xoom cost more, I would still go with the Xoom.
Many people purchasing tablets consider one key factor: getting the same OS as their phone. While there is no single tablet or phone that outsells the two or three Apple products, the overall trend is Android (at least in phones). People don't care if their tablet matches the brand (i.e. Motorola, Apple, etc), they only want the same operating system so that they can reuse the apps.
In the end, I think Android begins to outsell Apple tablets because of this familiarity with the OS.
Assuming the Nexus 7 is the big iPad killer, or even some other android tablet. If it is locked down as the summary suggests, somebody will release a tablet that isn't locked down. Once the iPad has been knocked off the pinnacle of tablets, others will enter the market. If the market wants an unlocked tablet, they will get an unlocked tablet. Plain and simple strategy: First get people to realize that there are quality alternatives to Apple. Next offer them products that they really want. Finally offer them a product the way they want it.
Hell, they stretch GPL requirements by releasing source code months later and no one does anything.
I didn't like it either, but this is just wrong. They did release the GPL parts - namely, the kernel. They didn't release all the userspace, but that's Apache2 licensed, not GPL.
Dilbert RSS feed
what services do you expect code for, exactly?
http://code.google.com/intl/pt-PT/opensource/projects.html
Dilbert RSS feed
The commodity tablets are here. All the Chinese companies want, is to sell their hardware and collect their fairly small margin (which I think may be a bigger margin than the American competitor will get). The Chinese company doesn't have a store or service that they're trying to lock you into, the way that Apple, Amazon, and (sort of, this one is complicated) Google wants you locked in. The cheapest commodity unit is made by someone with no incentive to lock down -- so they don't. Thus you get a perverse situation where the best stuff (if you ignore hardware quality) just happens to also be the cheapest.
All you have to do, is abstain from buying hardware branded by anyone who has a "store." Whether we're talking about phones, tablets, game consoles, desktops, or servers: deep down you know anyone who wants to make their money on the razor blades rather than the razor, is trying to rip you off. So Just Say No to that and look at who is left. When you do that, there is no lockdown or paying to unlock basic functionality.
And if you learn to buy Chinese in order to get the best devices, eventually non-Chinese manufacturers will learn to make something that you might want to some day buy. All you have to do, is not give in, and you'll win. Just don't be a pussy, and stay away from Micropplzon and their kind.
One need only casually peruse Google Play to see how different some devices are and how apps may or may not work on all of the various Android devices.
I hear what you're saying but I just don't see how Google adding their software and services to what you get from AOSP after the fact makes Android any less open. I have several Android installs that do not have the Google apps suite and while there is a large amount of value to Google's proprietary offerings, they aren't necessary for Android to function in any way. The only real argument that I have to Android being somehow less than truly open is the need for proprietary binaries to utilize all of the hardware on the reference devices. It sucks that in order to get a fully functioning Nexus or MZ604 Xoom, I have to install blobs for the GPU, wi-fi, camera, and accelerometer. Unfortunately Tizen nor Jolla will solve this problem as in order for handsets running those OS's to be competitive performance-wise, they will also have to make use of hardware that doesn't have open drivers. In the ARM space, there isn't a single high performance GPU that is open that I'm aware of and before we can have a truly open source system from top to bottom, that will have to change.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
And how many of the PC vendors that "won" in the '80s are still around? The big two, IBM and Compaq, were forced out of the business. HP is still slugging it out, but is losing money. Remember Packard Bell? Or Gateway? Olivetti's PC division? Epson's PC division? AST Research? Micron's PC division? Tandy's x86 clones? These are the companies that "won" the PC market in the '80s and '90s. Where are they now?
And yet Apple is still in the PC business, and still turning a profit at it.
Google is the new Microsoft.
I'm afraid you might be right there. Google is the mobile market's puppetmaster.
Considering the binary downloads necessary to make a fully working ROM for the Nexus 7 are available for download right on AOSP I would find it pretty absurd if they made those binaries useless by locking the device.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Which is why I only buy Nexus series devices. They are completely unlocked, both SIM card and bootloader, no matter what carrier I use.
"...the last thing either manufacturers or companies want is for users to start fiddling with the settings or installing their own software."
This is probably why I'll never own a tablet.
Nope. The Nexus 7 has an unlockable bootloader (via fastboot oem unlock), like the Galaxy Nexus, and the Nexus S. Happy Hacking!
So what this boils down to is that open tablets that allow me to install whatever I want are bad because the manufacturers won't like it.
I don't give two shits what the device maker wants or likes. When I buy something, it is mine. Not theirs. If I own a device, I have the right to have full admin priveleges on that device and do with it as I please, install whatever software and operating systems I want.
This is just bullshit FUD trying to con people into being ok with purchasing devices they don't own.
Since most likely they will replace the PC, phones and tablets need to be user opened: I need to be able to change the OS, because I want so. I don't have to wait for a "blessed by the manufacturer" version of ICS. This "jailbraking" madness will stop (said the optimist).
That is nonsense, their services all have high quality open APIs, mostly very well documented, and mostly for the benefit of open source integration. They don't give you all their code, duh, but they do go out of their way to allow you to integrate with it. If you can already integrate with it, it can't possibly be "problematic."
You're obviously not even a developer if you're spewing that drivel. Now get off my lawn before I turn the hose on you!
Don't be cruel to Kommander Liz. 'She' only joined Slashdot this morning, and has since then posted one submission, 'Getting by without Google' and two articles, both of which are in this thread. How could you possibly accuse 'her' of being an anti-Google troll?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
... seem to work just fine as free software projects. There are actually only three large general projects that I personally use regularly: Linux, Firefox and GIMP. In addition to those, I use hundreds of small very targeted utilities on daily bases. These are typically one or two developers with a handful of additional contributors type of affair, and most of them have been working that way perfectly well for years or even decades. And a quick glance at sourceforge or any other free software repository will show similar results. It seems to me that the author of the article has no idea what he is talking about.
AccountKiller
The Samsung Galaxy S1, 2, and 3 are almost all unlocked and are generally rooted before they even launch. They are the most customizable AND successful android phones on the market, and Samsung is making money hand over fist on them.
We've worked hard to never ship binary blob kernel drivers or any nonsense like that in Nexus devices, but yeah, proprietary userspace libraries are still needed for some peripherals against our best efforts. For wifi/bt it's generally just firmware that's downloaded to the device and not actual code that runs on the Linux side of the world. For the GPU all the vendors we've worked with on Nexus devices have provided GPL'd drivers for the kernel (resource management, etc), but provide closed opengl userspace libraries. Camera stacks vary -- the Nexus S didn't require any proprietary camera library goop in userspace iirc. I think we've been steadily improving the situation, but it's an uphill battle and I don't see a fully-open and also adequately performant GPU/opengl solution on the horizon yet.
I do appreciate that you've backed way off lately, but still:
Fuck off, bonch.
The API is free. The service is not, if you're a high-volume user, and even then it's very cheap. Why the fuck would you expect the service to be free?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
How about Android Market, er, Google Play?
For a long time, Archos devices didn't support Android Market either. A couple years ago, Google refused to license Android Market for use in Android devices with no cellular radio because 3G Internet access and either CDMA or GSM telephony were requirements in the Compatibility Definition Document. That's part of why there wasn't a close substitute for the iPod touch until the fourth quarter of 2011 when Samsung introduced the Galaxy Player. But I don't see how that's "lockdown" any more than what other tablets and phones already impose, seeing as one can turn on Unknown Sources and (presumably) put on other stores like SlideME and AppsLib and F-Droid.
It was an expensive tablet (Not as expensive as an iPad)
When it was first released, it was quite a bit more expensive - $799, if I remember correctly.
A cloud hosting provider for Linux (like, say, Amazon) is not free either, but it doesn't make the software less free. You pay for the service. It's not free to run, it actually uses up valuable resources - why do you expect them to subsidize you?
A typical paperback novel is around 9" on the diagonal, so your 7" device should be compact enough to fit in a pocket (suit or cargo pants, whichever floats your boat). That's important; it's a nuisance needing to have an extra bag/pouch/purse to carry.
As to it not being a sufficient improvement over a cellphone screen, GP must either have exceptional eyesight or be blind. Or own a really big phone.
While the 9-10 inch machines are even more of an improvement, they're considerably more bulky.
I'm typing this on an Eee. Its footprint is just smaller than a sheet of A4. It fits in a shoulder bag I bought years ago because it would just take a Wrox or similar book. Any bigger (like my old T40) and I'd need a specialized laptop bag.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."