They WOULD be handy to have if most requirements documents weren't garbage and near useless. This is assuming that your customer even knows what they want and can give clear requirements.
And here is one from February with newer data showing about the same breakdown. Basically being an Android manufacturer is like being a PC manufacturer. It's a low-margin race to the bottom.
And before someone tries to say "but that article is from October 2010!!!" to dispute its accuracy here is one from February of this year with more data that shows about the same breakdown.
And before someone will come back to try to dispute me read this. Apple makes rakes in 50% of the smartphone profits worldwide. Nokia rakes in 15%, RIM 14%. The other manufacturers (HTC, Samsung, Motorola, etc) who are basically the most of the well-known Android handset makers are fighting over the last measly 20%. Why would Nokia want to fight a race to the bottom when it comes to profits?
Can you think of ANY reason beneficial to the consumer of an Android device for it to record the exact same information? Oh right, it's only bad if it's happening on the iPhone. If an Android device does it we must spin and defend Google at all costs!
And yet all the politicians who think we need to enact all these stricter laws when it comes to video game sales will ignore this and try to claim that any 5 year old can walk into a game store and buy GTA IV on their own.
You aren't EXPECTED to be running a ten year old OS, or even a five year old OS, so why support it?
Why am I not expected to do so? If it works and I can still run modern versions of apps why should one spend money to upgrade? Not everyone needs "ooh shiny!". This isn't like with Linux where you have to upgrade the OS just to run Firefox 4.
Yes and the support length is 20 times longer than the average Ubuntu release (LTS is only 1/4th the length of XP's support window). Thus they aren't even remotely in the same league.
Maybe you should actually research these things before speaking? So as I said, I have to pay $49/year for RHEL desktop to get something even approaching what Microsoft gives for free so that it can be supported for around 7-8 years. Once you pass that threshold support costs go up even more. So for the same length of time I've run XP using RHEL desktop would have cost me 5x as much and I'd have to live with ancient versions of programs.
Good for them, but even an LTS provides only 1/4th the length of support that Microsoft has for XP.
Also when upgrades cost nothing it is not fair to compare them to an OS that costs to replace.
You mean except for when you have to spend time and money fixing all the breaks between OS releases? It only costs "nothing" if your time and effort aren't worth anything.
You did not get free "support" for XP. You got free bug fixes. There's a big difference.
And which Linux distro backports security fixes to an 10+ year old release and for free? Red Hat sure won't.
Almost all Linux distros give you unlimited free bugfixes, and free version upgrades, forever.
Bullshit. Not a single distro backports anything to 10 year old version so you are full of it. Not even Red Hat provides security fixes for an OS version as long as Microsoft and surely not at no additional cost. So the only real solution is to backport all the stuff yourself and as we all know everyone is intimately familiar enough with the massive kernel to do so and obviously everyone is a programmer. Otherwise you either get dropped support after 2 years or you have to pay $50/year to get your desktop from Red Hat supported.
For those who don't trust themselves enough to run their own computers, paid support can be obtained for *all* OSes - proprietary or not.
So I have to pay someone to get the equivalent of the 11 years of free security fixes from Microsoft which in the end means I pay more than the XP license cost by a couple of times over? Wow, what a deal!
And which FOSS vendor gives 11 years of free support like 100s of millions have gotten from Microsoft on XP? To get the "self-support" option for a single desktop user from Red Hat you pay $49 a year.
Not even Red Hat most likely. And even if they did you'd be paying way more than the cost of what your Windows license was and you only get a single year of support! Whereas for the 100 dollars I paid for XP I got 5 years of free mainstream support and an additional 6 years of security fixes.
And they provide 11 years of support for their product? Even Ubuntu's LTS is what? 2 years? And Red Hat? So basically I have to annually pay more to get support than what I paid for the XP license to begin with? You're joking, right?
Or you know you have code already written in C or C++ that you don't want to have to spend time and money rewriting. Not everyone who wants to use the NDK is doing it for stupid reasons.
Honeycomb is just an example of how Google could arbitrarily close the source of their AND YOUR changes.
Outside of the Linux kernel (which they did release the code for) how many contributors who have actually had their changes incorporated into the other parts Android weren't part of the OHA or already partnered up with Google?
Actually, the company developing Android before Google bought them chose Linux for the same reason TiVO and many other vendors do: opportunistic leeching on the community, while none of their changes ever make it back into the core.
Then they shouldn't have released the code under a license that allowed people to do so. If you want people to be obligated to give back you should have written it as an additional clause in the license. Being butthurt after the fact and then trying to impose a whole bunch of unwritten rules on people on tends to make them either go away or just ignore you even more.
Sometimes you need to be a lawyer, and sometimes you just need to read the damn license and use common sense.
Licenses can have terms in them that aren't enforceable by law. Just because a license says something doesn't make it binding.
It doesn't matter what you consider a derivative work when there is no dispute that a component being distributed is under the GPL.
That one component is GPL doesn't mean everything is. There is nothing in the GPLv2 that says this. Now there is a clause in the GPLv3 where you might have a point but whether that clause is legally enforceable is something of a gray area.
The only thing that matters is what's stated in the license, because that's the only legal reason you have to distribute a copyrighted work.
No, what matters is whether the license terms are enforceable by the current laws it is held up by.
If you replaced the GPL kernel with an unlicensed Microsoft Windows kernel, nobody would claim that Microsoft didn't have legal grounds to sue.
But that is some completely separate scenario than what we are talking about. The more relevant analogous scenario would be claiming that using a licensed version of the Windows kernel means that all software has to be under the same license that the kernel is. This is absurd and would be struck down in court.
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They WOULD be handy to have if most requirements documents weren't garbage and near useless. This is assuming that your customer even knows what they want and can give clear requirements.
And here is one from February with newer data showing about the same breakdown. Basically being an Android manufacturer is like being a PC manufacturer. It's a low-margin race to the bottom.
And before someone tries to say "but that article is from October 2010!!!" to dispute its accuracy here is one from February of this year with more data that shows about the same breakdown.
And before someone will come back to try to dispute me read this. Apple makes rakes in 50% of the smartphone profits worldwide. Nokia rakes in 15%, RIM 14%. The other manufacturers (HTC, Samsung, Motorola, etc) who are basically the most of the well-known Android handset makers are fighting over the last measly 20%. Why would Nokia want to fight a race to the bottom when it comes to profits?
That said, I'm still scratching my head why Nokia didn't go with Android.
Because they don't want to fight for the barebones margins of being another Android handset maker?
That a majority of "normal Texans" still support the party that enables this madness tells me all I need to know about "normal Texans".
Because there is a viable political party in the US that opposes the current patent system? Oh right, there isn't.
these devices do things an iPad can not and will not ever do.
Like having a non-functioning SD card slot in the cause of the Xoom?
Can you think of ANY reason beneficial to the consumer of an Android device for it to record the exact same information? Oh right, it's only bad if it's happening on the iPhone. If an Android device does it we must spin and defend Google at all costs!
Because having no SD card slot is better than having a Xoom which has a non-functional SD card slot?
And yet try to send a 6 year old to buy a Mature rated game and watch them get denied in almost any store you can send them to.
And yet all the politicians who think we need to enact all these stricter laws when it comes to video game sales will ignore this and try to claim that any 5 year old can walk into a game store and buy GTA IV on their own.
You aren't EXPECTED to be running a ten year old OS, or even a five year old OS, so why support it?
Why am I not expected to do so? If it works and I can still run modern versions of apps why should one spend money to upgrade? Not everyone needs "ooh shiny!". This isn't like with Linux where you have to upgrade the OS just to run Firefox 4.
Yes and the support length is 20 times longer than the average Ubuntu release (LTS is only 1/4th the length of XP's support window). Thus they aren't even remotely in the same league.
RHEL is for production boxes not desktops
O rly?
Desktop
Self-support Subscription (1 year)$49
Maybe you should actually research these things before speaking? So as I said, I have to pay $49/year for RHEL desktop to get something even approaching what Microsoft gives for free so that it can be supported for around 7-8 years. Once you pass that threshold support costs go up even more. So for the same length of time I've run XP using RHEL desktop would have cost me 5x as much and I'd have to live with ancient versions of programs.
Ubuntu charges nothing for patches,
Good for them, but even an LTS provides only 1/4th the length of support that Microsoft has for XP.
Also when upgrades cost nothing it is not fair to compare them to an OS that costs to replace.
You mean except for when you have to spend time and money fixing all the breaks between OS releases? It only costs "nothing" if your time and effort aren't worth anything.
You did not get free "support" for XP. You got free bug fixes. There's a big difference.
And which Linux distro backports security fixes to an 10+ year old release and for free? Red Hat sure won't.
Almost all Linux distros give you unlimited free bugfixes, and free version upgrades, forever.
Bullshit. Not a single distro backports anything to 10 year old version so you are full of it. Not even Red Hat provides security fixes for an OS version as long as Microsoft and surely not at no additional cost. So the only real solution is to backport all the stuff yourself and as we all know everyone is intimately familiar enough with the massive kernel to do so and obviously everyone is a programmer. Otherwise you either get dropped support after 2 years or you have to pay $50/year to get your desktop from Red Hat supported.
For those who don't trust themselves enough to run their own computers, paid support can be obtained for *all* OSes - proprietary or not.
So I have to pay someone to get the equivalent of the 11 years of free security fixes from Microsoft which in the end means I pay more than the XP license cost by a couple of times over? Wow, what a deal!
Ubuntu. You can just keep upgrading in place for 0.
Ubuntu provides 11 years of support for a release? Since when? Also "upgrading in place" is not support.
And just like before you were asked to clarify based on what type of alloy and grade of steel.
And which FOSS vendor gives 11 years of free support like 100s of millions have gotten from Microsoft on XP? To get the "self-support" option for a single desktop user from Red Hat you pay $49 a year.
Not even Red Hat most likely. And even if they did you'd be paying way more than the cost of what your Windows license was and you only get a single year of support! Whereas for the 100 dollars I paid for XP I got 5 years of free mainstream support and an additional 6 years of security fixes.
So then buy from Redhat, or Ubuntu or whoever.
And they provide 11 years of support for their product? Even Ubuntu's LTS is what? 2 years? And Red Hat? So basically I have to annually pay more to get support than what I paid for the XP license to begin with? You're joking, right?
Or you know you have code already written in C or C++ that you don't want to have to spend time and money rewriting. Not everyone who wants to use the NDK is doing it for stupid reasons.
Honeycomb is just an example of how Google could arbitrarily close the source of their AND YOUR changes.
Outside of the Linux kernel (which they did release the code for) how many contributors who have actually had their changes incorporated into the other parts Android weren't part of the OHA or already partnered up with Google?
Actually, the company developing Android before Google bought them chose Linux for the same reason TiVO and many other vendors do: opportunistic leeching on the community, while none of their changes ever make it back into the core.
Then they shouldn't have released the code under a license that allowed people to do so. If you want people to be obligated to give back you should have written it as an additional clause in the license. Being butthurt after the fact and then trying to impose a whole bunch of unwritten rules on people on tends to make them either go away or just ignore you even more.
Do you have the case law to say it isn't?
Because I was the one making the claim, right?
Sometimes you need to be a lawyer, and sometimes you just need to read the damn license and use common sense.
Licenses can have terms in them that aren't enforceable by law. Just because a license says something doesn't make it binding.
It doesn't matter what you consider a derivative work when there is no dispute that a component being distributed is under the GPL.
That one component is GPL doesn't mean everything is. There is nothing in the GPLv2 that says this. Now there is a clause in the GPLv3 where you might have a point but whether that clause is legally enforceable is something of a gray area.
The only thing that matters is what's stated in the license, because that's the only legal reason you have to distribute a copyrighted work.
No, what matters is whether the license terms are enforceable by the current laws it is held up by.
If you replaced the GPL kernel with an unlicensed Microsoft Windows kernel, nobody would claim that Microsoft didn't have legal grounds to sue.
But that is some completely separate scenario than what we are talking about. The more relevant analogous scenario would be claiming that using a licensed version of the Windows kernel means that all software has to be under the same license that the kernel is. This is absurd and would be struck down in court.