Slashdot Mirror
Foxconn Betting Big On Firefox OS
jfruh writes "Foxconn is firmly identified in the public mind as the company that manufactures iPhones and iPads. But the company is looking to forge its own identity, and sees Firefox OS as the means to do so. To that end, Foxconn is hiring thousands of developers to help work on the open source phone OS and Foxconn's own suite of cloud services."
I hope they succeed!
-Sent from my iPhone
that had (at least on paper) thousands of devs that didn't go anywhere. funded by people like Intel, too.
actual devices to shops or gtfo.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
by being asian
I'm sure you can store a snapshot of your system at any time. To run an app offline, simple view the snapshot in an image viewer.
signature is pants
How about a Cloud OS? A VM OS that lives in the cloud and sends screens (instead of data) to your PC, tablet, phone, etc. It will have blazing fast network access, can add cores, RAM, disk space with a click. If you are a geek, you can probably do this, but there are so many details to work out and it violates the terms of service for many hosting places. Make it cheap and easy for the masses. The tech is there, but it isn't mainstream.
yeah everything is would be fast except actual interaction! brilliant!
https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud+desktop have fun.
I don't understand how you think it violates terms of hosting places though.. it doesn't. you might need a license on the os you run in there though of course. but you would just end up using android on your desktop if you went this route since if the same stuff and programs are streamed to all of your devices, you're going go by the shittiest device and not the best.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Mozilla has such a (well-deserved) squeaky clean image. Considering the slight damage the Foxconn fiasco did to Apple's brand, I pray nothing happens to tarnish Mozilla's good name. Considering this is a partnership, it may prove difficult, if not, impossible to pull out if things start to go wrong. I wish them all the best.
[Rent This Space]
Its hard enough getting 3 developers working together to produce quality software, let alone 3 THOUSAND. How exactly do they plan to manage this?
From the article, I gather that this is not 3,000 developers working on the OS or its elements, but rather, 3,000 developers spread across many separate projects to develop apps for the brand-new OS. This could be projects consisting of 1, 2, or 10 developers each.
This is actually a really novel approach and I bet Microsoft are now kicking themselves that they didn't think of it. In a matter of weeks, or at most a few months, a fully-populated app-store can be made available. With this approach, they'll be probably ranked #3 straight out the gate in terms of apps. Bravo.
[Rent This Space]
That is EXACTLY what it needs. I don't want a phone supported by Apple or Google.
I thought the Americans were violating all security and trust according to recent news?
The day may come when Apple is just the distribution arm of Foxconn. Apple needs Foxconn more than Foxconn needs Apple.
Introducing the new Slashdot Phone!
Get hourly updates featuring
-Vague laws misinterpreted by engineers to be threats to privacy/civil liberties
-The latest release of every obscure Linux distro and its shortcomings compared to 10 other distros
-Factually spurious articles about the death of the IT industry.
-Philosophical flame wars about the validity of alternative energy/electric cars
-Mental masturbation regarding drones/macs/climate change
-Hypothetical discussions of Rasberry Pi created by Arduino driven 3-D printers purchased with BitCoins.
-Windows 8 trolling
I imagine the labor laws are rather lax in the places where they have their offices. I don't think they're committing to hiring a person for N number of months straight off the bat. Those 3000 could be tried out and laid off continuously until they have ~300 good developers that they can spread out across ~50 projects at any one time.
It's not the number of (non-game) apps that matters, it's the quality and coverage. There are 'only' a couple of hundred good non-game apps out there for Android and iOS anyway.
A number of these are open source. I'm sure you can find something to your liking on that list.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
As somebody that has had some contact with the new FFOS SDK, user's might be interested to know it as yet, has no secure storage (think Keychain), where apps can store your passwords. On top of that, apps are written in HTML and Javascript so potentially, malware could scrape your email and passwords from insecure storage if an app stores your username and password for subsequent logins, and, even if the app developer attempts some level of security with encryption keys embedded in the app code, it's JS, which the malware could also grab (it's just a file on the device afterall), and relatively easily scrape out the encryption key and algorithm used.
Don't underestimate the impact of how the news of the NSA-Big American Tech orgy is playing out abroad. The Snowden leak has confirmed the most cynical suspicions of most mainland Chinese, and the pressure in that billion+ market for products unstained by NSA influence will become a major tech driver in the near future. In fact, for most people in the world, the only spying they dislike more than being spied on by their own governments is being spied on by the USA. Unless Microsoft, Google, and Apple can put together a successful Hail Mary marketing campaign to salvage their images, alternatives like Firefox OS are very likely to see surprising growth in their market share.
In other words, what Foxconn is doing may not be Open Source altruism. More likely, they are positioning themselves to ride an anti-NSA wave, particularly in mainland China.