Wozniak To Apple: Consider Building an Android Phone

snydeq writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has some advice for Apple CEO Tim Cook: consider offering a phone based on the rival Google Android platform. Speaking at the Apps World conference in San Francisco, Wozniak made the suggestion of an Apple Android device when responding to a question about the fate of the faltering BlackBerry platform, saying that BlackBerry should have built an Android phone, and that Apple could do so, too. 'BlackBerry's very sad for me,' Wozniak lamented. 'I think it's probably too late now' for an Android-based BlackBerry phone. Apple, Woz said, has had some lucky victories in the marketplace in the past decade, and BlackBerry's demise may provide a cautionary tale: 'There's nothing to keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.'"

Comments

Alleged Apple patents on Android

[tepples]

There's nothing to keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market.

Of course there is. Apple isn't allowed to distribute copies of Android to the public except under license from Linus Torvalds, Google, and other contributors to Android. If Apple accepts the license of Android (mostly Apache v2 and GPLv2), it has to give the public an implicit or explicit license to patents that Apple holds that Android allegedly infringes. So unless Apple wants to end up dropping lawsuits against Samsung, it has to refrain from making an iDroid.

Re:first

[steveg]

Let me endorse this. It's a very well thought out opening post for a discussion, and both Slashdot staff and users could benefit from reading it.