Because it is free and open code they nearly do all they want! The license might make them submit their code, but if the original code is under BSD license or something similar, they really can do all the want!
Unfortunately for this business plan, the most important part of Android - the operating system kernel, which gives them among other things the multitasking, memory protection and network protocols needed for a modern smart phone - is licensed under the GPL. Both Google and its stable of Android manufacturers have to follow the copyright license of the GPL just like everyone else. For extra credit, they should also try to harmonize with the spirit of the community from which they received this valuable gift.
It's not looking the other way, it's the agreement.
Are you suggesting it's Google's agreement to sell out the developers whose code they rely on? Because it is certainly not the intention of said developers to be locked out of their own code that way. At least, it was certainly not my intention and I believe my opinion is shared by a large segment of the Linux community.
Sun's early entry would have accelerated the process substantially. IBM by contrast got into Linux seriously around 1999 and some say, saved its mainframe business that way.
Sun in no way needed to grab business from Red Hat or others. In fact, Sun would have been well advised to simply offer a menu of Linux distributions as IBM did. With Linux, Sun could have held on to and expanded its customer base instead of losing a substantial part of it to Microsoft and other, less hesitant market participants.
Sun bought Cobalt, a successful Linux server business, and instead of capitalizing on it, buried it. That alone is worth the corporate death penalty. If Sun had swallowed their pride and put their weight fully behind their Linux server business they would now own a serious share of the world's server rooms, not to mention the personal server business. Consider: Red Hat's market cap is now over 9 billion, and that without any hardware offering. How on earth did Sun miss the party?
The weirdest thing is, Larry Ellison fully intends to continue the idiocy of shoving Solaris and Sparc down the throats of customers who don't want it. The inevitable result couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Well, I absolutely expect USB ports on any tablet I buy. No USB ports = send it back. It would never occur to me anybody would be stupid enough to try to sell this form factor without USB ports. Even my phone has a USB port.
Oh wait, this is Google's Bob. Google figures, it's growing up to be a big important company like Microsoft, it too needs a Bob. A kind of rite of passage.
... why are they not just making the OS free for all? The Hexeh Chromium builds have shown that it can run on a variety of hardware... I don't understand why Google is partnering with device manufacturers instead of just letting this into the wild for everyone...
just a large android, too awkward to use as a phone, too big to carry around, what's the point?
Exactly my reaction to iPad when Apple announced it. I was wrong, there are plenty of uses for a tablet form factor. Two in my immediate world: 1) A computer that fits in the flap of my camera back to which I can upload photos for in-the-field high res slideshow. 2) A touchscreen program controller for my synth keyboard.
With a bluetooth keyboard and stand, should be perfectly able to replace a netbook or laptop for road trips. Subject to replacing lame Android interface with a real desktop like KDE of course.
Gimp isn't getting much funding at all. The glacial pace of development demonstrates that pretty well, IMV.
This demonstrates another important point about open source: it is more important that development should never stop than that it should proceed at some particular pace. With all its flaws, Girmp is still a powerful tool that gets the job done. As it happens, I just finished an hour with Gimp doing some pretty sophisticated image manipulation. An example of one WTF moment: rectangular select comes complete with a dialog box in which exact pixel region dimensions can be entered, exactly what I need. You would think that as soon as you manually change a value, the current selection region will change, but no, it only does so if you first click inside the current selection. WTF? It's perfectly clear what I the user expected. Just a little fit and finish issue, one of hundreds in Gimp. Yet: 1) it never crashed 2) it let me produce exactly the image I wanted 3) it did the job quickly after figuring out the interface oddities. I'm not complaining too much.
Incidentally, I would say that this type of interface issue has more to do with being written in C versus C++ than the amount of money behind the project. With C++ it is much easier to bolt things together so that user actions end up doing something reasonable even when the relationships between components are complex. And in C you have to come up with some kind of barefoot implementation of polymorphism in order to build anything that juggles a lot of different kinds of objects as Gimp does. This only kinda sorta works. You end up with a lot of weird glue and programming conventions that obscure the basic structure of the problem. This glue works against the kind of global refactoring that is necessary to evolve a system in the direction of more elegance and power. Just speaking as someone who has written this kind of software in both languages. I still find C a better choice for certain problems such as high performance array smashing, where C++ is positively primitive in comparison (e.g., no variable size arrays, no designated initializers) but for anything complex, C++ is just way, way better. Fortunately, it is very easy to mix the two, you can call C++ from C just as easily as the other way round. So it's not hard to take a big C project and convert parts of it to C++. I would hope that one day the Gimp team sees the light and does exactly that. (I'm just going to hit post now, and not even attempt to get this ramble back on track.)
Open source drivers are not useful for serious 3D work on Linux.
I'm currently doing serious 3D work with the Xorg Radeon driver with 4350 and 4850 cards (the former slow but fanless and quiet). The driver has been rock solid including suspend/resume. The only noticable regressions so far are lines not antialiased and bilinear filtering not working for mipmapping. These are in no way an obstacle to development work and I have every confidence these issues will be addressed in due course, and probably have already been addressed in upstream. Unlike the closed NVidia drivers I've used in the past, every one of which has had serious issues ranging from non working text console to black screen on reboot and many others. Never mind the inconvenience of having to build a new kernel wrapper on every kernel upgrade, and deal with NVidia's braindamaged driver installer.
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Because it is free and open code they nearly do all they want! The license might make them submit their code, but if the original code is under BSD license or something similar, they really can do all the want!
Unfortunately for this business plan, the most important part of Android - the operating system kernel, which gives them among other things the multitasking, memory protection and network protocols needed for a modern smart phone - is licensed under the GPL. Both Google and its stable of Android manufacturers have to follow the copyright license of the GPL just like everyone else. For extra credit, they should also try to harmonize with the spirit of the community from which they received this valuable gift.
It's not looking the other way, it's the agreement.
Are you suggesting it's Google's agreement to sell out the developers whose code they rely on? Because it is certainly not the intention of said developers to be locked out of their own code that way. At least, it was certainly not my intention and I believe my opinion is shared by a large segment of the Linux community.
Store all your data in the cloud, but store in encrypted with a public key that's only on your device
What do you do if you lose access to your data, perhaps because someone took it away?
I just have one concern though -- the fact that everything you do is stored in the cloud. This means zero privacy.
Relax, you don't have a thing to worry about according to Eric Schmidt.
Then why does Google look the other way as manufacturers engage in blatant lockdown of this supposedly free and open code?
Assange is a douchebag
And you're not?
Rubbish. Two words: NT server.
I'm missing your point, way missing it.
Sun's early entry would have accelerated the process substantially. IBM by contrast got into Linux seriously around 1999 and some say, saved its mainframe business that way.
Sun in no way needed to grab business from Red Hat or others. In fact, Sun would have been well advised to simply offer a menu of Linux distributions as IBM did. With Linux, Sun could have held on to and expanded its customer base instead of losing a substantial part of it to Microsoft and other, less hesitant market participants.
Sun missed the party because they were worth far far more than RedHat.
Were worth. With Sun's branding and sales network it should have been able to grow a Linux business far faster than Red Hat. But.
Sun bought Cobalt, a successful Linux server business, and instead of capitalizing on it, buried it. That alone is worth the corporate death penalty. If Sun had swallowed their pride and put their weight fully behind their Linux server business they would now own a serious share of the world's server rooms, not to mention the personal server business. Consider: Red Hat's market cap is now over 9 billion, and that without any hardware offering. How on earth did Sun miss the party?
The weirdest thing is, Larry Ellison fully intends to continue the idiocy of shoving Solaris and Sparc down the throats of customers who don't want it. The inevitable result couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
Red Hat? Salesforce?
Or cook their own food.
Well, I absolutely expect USB ports on any tablet I buy. No USB ports = send it back. It would never occur to me anybody would be stupid enough to try to sell this form factor without USB ports. Even my phone has a USB port.
Oh wait, Apple...
Oh wait, this is Google's Bob. Google figures, it's growing up to be a big important company like Microsoft, it too needs a Bob. A kind of rite of passage.
... why are they not just making the OS free for all? The Hexeh Chromium builds have shown that it can run on a variety of hardware... I don't understand why Google is partnering with device manufacturers instead of just letting this into the wild for everyone...
Not everyone at Google is smart I suppose.
Security? Bad things happen when you let people administer their own computers.
Or drive their own cars or own their own homes.
There, I think that sums it up. Take a general purpose computer and cripple it so it can only run a browser. Brilliant. Good luck with that.
TFA says there'll be a "jail-breaking mode
Why should there be a jail in the first place?
5. Display port.
just a large android, too awkward to use as a phone, too big to carry around, what's the point?
Exactly my reaction to iPad when Apple announced it. I was wrong, there are plenty of uses for a tablet form factor. Two in my immediate world: 1) A computer that fits in the flap of my camera back to which I can upload photos for in-the-field high res slideshow. 2) A touchscreen program controller for my synth keyboard.
With a bluetooth keyboard and stand, should be perfectly able to replace a netbook or laptop for road trips. Subject to replacing lame Android interface with a real desktop like KDE of course.
Gimp isn't getting much funding at all. The glacial pace of development demonstrates that pretty well, IMV.
This demonstrates another important point about open source: it is more important that development should never stop than that it should proceed at some particular pace. With all its flaws, Girmp is still a powerful tool that gets the job done. As it happens, I just finished an hour with Gimp doing some pretty sophisticated image manipulation. An example of one WTF moment: rectangular select comes complete with a dialog box in which exact pixel region dimensions can be entered, exactly what I need. You would think that as soon as you manually change a value, the current selection region will change, but no, it only does so if you first click inside the current selection. WTF? It's perfectly clear what I the user expected. Just a little fit and finish issue, one of hundreds in Gimp. Yet: 1) it never crashed 2) it let me produce exactly the image I wanted 3) it did the job quickly after figuring out the interface oddities. I'm not complaining too much.
Incidentally, I would say that this type of interface issue has more to do with being written in C versus C++ than the amount of money behind the project. With C++ it is much easier to bolt things together so that user actions end up doing something reasonable even when the relationships between components are complex. And in C you have to come up with some kind of barefoot implementation of polymorphism in order to build anything that juggles a lot of different kinds of objects as Gimp does. This only kinda sorta works. You end up with a lot of weird glue and programming conventions that obscure the basic structure of the problem. This glue works against the kind of global refactoring that is necessary to evolve a system in the direction of more elegance and power. Just speaking as someone who has written this kind of software in both languages. I still find C a better choice for certain problems such as high performance array smashing, where C++ is positively primitive in comparison (e.g., no variable size arrays, no designated initializers) but for anything complex, C++ is just way, way better. Fortunately, it is very easy to mix the two, you can call C++ from C just as easily as the other way round. So it's not hard to take a big C project and convert parts of it to C++. I would hope that one day the Gimp team sees the light and does exactly that. (I'm just going to hit post now, and not even attempt to get this ramble back on track.)
Yes, thankfully.
Have fun. We'll see you again pretty soon when Debian (and virtually all the other distros) switch to Wayland a year or two after Ubuntu rolls it out.
Debian will switch when Wayland is stable and has network transparency that is more than hand waving.
Open source drivers are not useful for serious 3D work on Linux.
I'm currently doing serious 3D work with the Xorg Radeon driver with 4350 and 4850 cards (the former slow but fanless and quiet). The driver has been rock solid including suspend/resume. The only noticable regressions so far are lines not antialiased and bilinear filtering not working for mipmapping. These are in no way an obstacle to development work and I have every confidence these issues will be addressed in due course, and probably have already been addressed in upstream. Unlike the closed NVidia drivers I've used in the past, every one of which has had serious issues ranging from non working text console to black screen on reboot and many others. Never mind the inconvenience of having to build a new kernel wrapper on every kernel upgrade, and deal with NVidia's braindamaged driver installer.
Its not a Red Hat project, the guy works for red hat but hes doing it on his own time. So say the faq at least.
Smells like a management issue at Red Hat.