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Qualcomm Collected Partial iPhone Royalties Despite Legal Battle With Apple (fortune.com)
From a report: Qualcomm continued to collect some royalties for Apple's use of its wireless technology in iPhones last year despite dueling lawsuits between the two mobile giants, cheering Qualcomm investors who feared that the payments had entirely dried up. Qualcomm said on Wednesday that Apple's contract manufacturers including Foxconn paid royalties, although they withheld around $1 billion from the undisclosed total amount due. The amount withheld equaled the amount Qualcomm withheld from Apple last year under a separate agreement to cooperate on mobile technology that has since expired.
apple and android are the same shit. what we need is open source smartphones, like the ubuntu phone was supposed to be. unfortunately it had to be boycotted by apple https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/canonical-says-apple-bought-all-the-sapphire-displays
looks like canonical wasn't able to succeed but at least they were able to scare apple.
It's infuriating to see that those same greedy corps whining about GPL's legal risks while happily waging those billion-heavy "intellectual poverty" wars.
Worst of all is to see some from our very community parroting this FUD.
apple and android are the same shit. what we need is open source smartphones
Android ITSELF *IS* open-source.
The things which are not open-source are :
- the drivers for hardware (so you're limited to whatever linux kernel the chipset vendor supplied to the handset manufacturer)
- the fuckton of pre-installed bloatware by the constructor
- the "Google Playstoe Service" if the handset went for an official commercial Google certification
(or whatever else services and ecosystem replaces it if the constructor decided to go its own way. Such Amazon's service)
- the whole booting process isn't open-source friendly, usually due to firmware signing (tivo-isation) preventing you the end-users to exerce the freedoms that GPL is supposed to grant you.
But the core of android, which gives you things such as LineagoOS (formely CyanogenMod) and Replicant (basically a free/libre only android distribution).
So android isn't the (main) problem. The problem is constructors who wants to lock the smartphone down, partly out of obligation (except for TI platforms, on most other platforms such as Qualcomm the modem and main CPU aren't as well separated - in some the modem is even the northbridge of the phone. And legally, that part is controlled by the wireless service provider holding the license for the band, not by the user), partly out of greed (bloatware !).
like the ubuntu phone was supposed to be.
Part of the problem that killed Ubuntu Phone is the same that Windows 10 Phone is still having : no app ecosystem.
Android and iOS ecosystems have basically won the game.
No Random Joe Sixpack User is going to use a smartphone OS that doesn't have tons of apps.
And no developper is ever going to develop yet another version for a OS that doesn't have any significant amount of users, they'll only focus on the 2 big vendors.
Canonical threw the towel before managing to tackle the problem.
And Microsoft never managed to find a way to tap into these ecosystems (well luckily for us, that failed attempt brought us at least WSL, so it's not a loss for everyone).
(Palm/HP webOS had a different problem : they bet on the wrong horse. They worked to keep compatibility with the legacy PalmOS ecosystem, but by the time the smartphone hit the market, that martket was dwindling against iOS. By the time they licensed Android app support it was to late in the lifecycle)
Luckily there *are* other alternatives now.
Mer is ensemble of core component to build GNU/Linux smartphone suites (it's the descendant of Maemo/Meego).
Sailfish OS by Jolla is a smartphone OS building on Mer (it's a cousin of Samsung's Tizen, etc.)
Sailfish OS is already nearly entirely licensed under an opensource license. The components which aren't yet are parts of the user interface, which are going to be officially opensourced in the future, and whose source is accessible anyway, because their are written in QML+Javascript (thus end-users can already modify it and share patches, which in practice brings nearly a good enough approximation of the liberties that the future opensource license will grant).
Official commercial release of Sailfish OS (like on Jolla's one smartphone or the few commercial contractors they've got. Like Intex, Turingphone, etc. Sony is a big brandname that will eventually join) supports a licensed copy of Myriad's AlienDalvik - so Jolla users don't get left in the cold app-wise.
Community ports of Sailfish OS (Fairphone 2, etc.) support SFDroid, an opensource application achieving the same goal.
Also, Jolla are the initial developpers of libhybris (That was also used by Ubuntu Phone) enabling use of drivers designed for Android userspace on a GNU/Linux userspace. Meaning that Sailfish OS can be ported even if the chipset manufecturer only provides android device drivers to the handset manufacturer.
That currently seems to be the best alternative to Android :
- full blown GNU/Linux platform
- most parts are licensed as open-source, the rest is similarily editable anyway
- can run apps for android (so user needing them can use sailfish OS, and app devloppers don't need to target yet another platform before sailfish is popular enough).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Two gigantic corporations can do more than one thing at a time.