Consider being a iOS developer wanting to using that engine for your application while competing against a similar application on Android.
Aren't you moving the goalposts there? First it was 'real world' web browsing on a Nexus S, and now it's load times (and not even that, just the timing of the callback) in a UI widget.
Still, what do you expect them to do to get accurate results? Use the actual browsers and sit there with a stopwatch?
I'd expect them to only make comments on things they know about, instead of asserting that fact A is proof of proposition B. These people are playing for media attention and using Android fanboyism to get their URL on as many pages as possible. Behold the birth of a profiteer's meme.
I think you don't understand the problem. The headline is "Android's browser is faster than iPhone's browser," but all they ever tested was:
The measurement itself was done using the custom apps, which use the platform’s embedded browser. This means WebView (based on Chrome) for Android, and UIWebView (based on Safari) for iPhone.
UIWebView is not Safari, and neither WebView nor UIWebView are "browsers."
Here, they address this point. First, they compared their app's times with Safari's times, and found no noticeable difference.
To go to the trouble of testing the thing with their own app, then testing Safari, publishing the numbers for their own app and not publishing the benchmark for Safari seems obtuse in the extreme. Just tell us the numbers you got for the browser.
Second, they point out that javascript performance accounts for a small fraction of the load times (see large yellow box at the top of the page), and if Nitro was not in use,
A web browser renders content and loads it as well as executing stuff; javascript is only one part of the whole operation and only pertains to certain use cases.
they estimate that using it would improve Safari's load times, but would not dramatically change the results.
Why estimate when they can just run a benchmark on the actual browser, instead of handwaving?
Remove all the reasons that people pirate, and publicize like crazy that they've done this.
The studios would not be rewarded... most people don't particularly understand what DRM is, and only rarely encounter it preventing them from watching a movie, and instead of making peace with a few torrenters it would just cause everybody to rip everything all the time. A consumer, who would otherwise be disposed to pay for a movie, would suddenly ask themselves "Why should I pay for a movie when a thousand kids on the local university campus just share it for free among themselves?" People don't respect corporations for letting information free, they just exploit them.
and in a normal file format+codec and not requiring a specialized client (e.g. iTunes)). Or at least make sure the DVD release doesn't use CSS.
Very few consumers download torrents to avoid iTunes, CSS or the MPEG-LA, these are just boogeymen of free speech zealots. The vast majority of torrenters just want a movie for a very low price (the cost of their internet connection and their time downloading) or to time- and place-shift their watching, to their mobile devices, to their hard drives, etc. If a media distributor, free or paying, TPB or Sony Pictures, can address these needs on the part of the consumer they'll win. Eliminating media portals and stores, CSS, or licensed codecs would be an utter waste of time, because the consumer knowledge of these things is extremely low and all of these technologies work great for a paying customer.
Any release of a "crippled" product (whether a corrupt datastream, or Bluray DRM, or whatever) is just a way of telling people to go get the movie from pirates.
It depends on where you're trying to hit on the price-value continuum -- some people want to own a movie but $20 seems too expensive, some people don't mind $20 for a good experience and some people are just cranks who want to steal things. The studios would do very well to release their torrents on their own sites, with branding and Web 2.0 and linking to IMDB and all that good stuff, along with the sort of library depth that pirate torrent sites simply could never meet. Eventually with appropriate marketing people would go to the studio's torrents, because they were the fastest, most convenient, offered the best selection and you didn't have to look over your shoulder for the MPAA.
What would be clever is releasing the Divx on a torrent, but making the torren pan-and-scan and standard def, mono audio, burned in French subtitles, and corrupt the datastream a little so that every few minutes the picture hangs. Such a torrent might be "good enough" for people that wanted to casually watch the movie, and would divert them from a better pirated copies, particularly if you made sure it was very easy to find, but would be unacceptable if you actually wanted to enjoy watching the movie, and would stimulate you to go buy the real one.
FWIW I keep my 200 gig sound effects library in Apple Lossless, I'm really not concerned about lockin in the near term. OTOH, my remote archives, the things that would take a month to download and re-encode, are FLAC'd, GPGd and DARd and PARd. I haven't really noticed a significant performance difference from either, though the systemwide metadata support (It is just an MP4 container) and auditioning in the OS for ALAC breaks the tie for me, for now.
As others have pointed out, Apple really doesn't make any profit from the iTunes business, they just make it available as an inducement to buying iThings -- people want iThings, but they actually want movies, books and videos more, and those things draw people to iThings. They key insight behind the pitching of these devices is the realization that people want content, and an iPod is just an Archos unless you put a store behind it. You can sell on the media you want to iThing owners, as long as you do the whole transaction over the web and don't rely on the platform to do DRM.
I don't know if that justifies the 30% thing, but we'll just see what they can get away with. The dream scenario for Apple is the studios go to the Android media markets, pay lower rates to sell on those, but the "openness" of Android allows the customers to use DRM ripping technology willynilly on the platform, causing the content distros to return to Apple, chastened, swearing never to allow their content on an open platform again. Apple's extracting a high tariff but they provide a protected pipeline, something I'm not sure any Android device will ever do. I'm really curious to see what WebOS does.
The dynamic on the Android phones is similar. If Android users ever begin to systematically circumvent call or SMS billing with VOIP, the phone providers won't play along.
I suspect the sort of hardware Samsung and Moto have to squeeze into a tablet, in order to compete with an iPad on performance, says more about Android than it does about Apple.
Red Book uses cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon codes, to the extent that about a quarter of the pits and lands on a CD are redundant; Yellow Book in this regard is identical. CDs have ample error correction, and this dosen't include the informational redundancy of PCM, which can allow linear and polynomial interpolation of dropouts.
Something Red Book does lack is a whole-disk or whole-song consistency check, but if that check doesn't allow reconstruction or repair, it's of questionable utility. CDs are a tolerant medium for a noisy world and were designed before anyone cared if their song's SHA-1 always hashed to the same value, and to this day anyone could care less. "cdparanoia" has "paranoia" in it's name for a reason-- it provides precision bordering on psychosis.
Is ALAC open? I know there's a reverse-engineered codec that's open, but I don't think Apple's lossless coder is in fact open or libre. If TFA says otherwise they may be misinformed.
Windows and Mac OSX have no more guarantee about max price to be spent than Linux does.
To be honest, I think you're rationalizing and this assertion doesn't reflect reality, not as much as it used to, particularly if Windows and OSX definitively have the feature X and Linux does not.
Setting up software that is in Debian' s repositories tends to be a trivial app store like experience.
Yeah I know. Just tell me where I can put in the credentials for my Google Checkout account so the downloaders can pay my licensing fee.
All software costs are non-fixed or high when you want new dev done
That's sortof the central trick though... if your business model works on a pay-per-user license, you can finance the development of one new package with the income from thousands of customers. The alternative, when you give away the software, is that one user or syndicate ends up in the catbird seat of financing all the development. If you'll notice, all of the successful, best-of-class OSS applications and systems that you can get now are in fact paid for by huge corporations, or are based on code and man-hours from moribund closed-source projects, and most of the ongoing labor comes from support and tweak enhancements.
The narrative, wherein a single coder has an itch to scratch, assembles hundreds of unpaid individuals around the world and delivers the best package you can get, is a myth. Most OSS projects you can name nowadays, and just about all consumer-facing ones, owe their refinement to large corporate sugar-daddies, present or historical, that dump(ed) man-hours into refining the projects to their needs, while simultaneously using those projects' very free-ness to deny markets to their competitors. The only exception I can think of at this time is ASF, but even they are deeply dependent on financial sponsorship from Google, Microsoft and Facebook. It suits these corps to have a free web server out there -- it means they can compete on providing plugins and services to sell their own attempts to separate users from their money and increasingly, their data.
Your argument is with capitalism - not some imagined cabal of geeks plotting against you.
My argument is that I want a product that has one predictable price, and once paid it works like any other tool. The open source business model is about selling services to make products that only work well enough to keep you buying more services -- Shuttleworth can engage in all the altruism he pleases but eventually someone needs to pay their bills, and for devs services on Linux are the only option. I don't want a serf, but if you decide a priori that shrinkwrapped software is forbidden, it becomes impossible to retail a "just works" solution; you're stuck paying the $100/hour guy who rolls his eyes at you all the time. I mean, this is your pitch for consumer Linux: it's free but your costs for support of X that Windows and OSX have will either cost you $unknown or $MAX_INT, if the feature is in forbidden by "stupid laws." Why would anyone take that deal? If you cannot yourself code, the continuing free-as-in-freedom benefits of Linux are meaningless.
I can't speak for the entire open source community, but I think the general sentiment would be "Wipe drive, reinstall Windows, and fuck off".
Everybody here assumes I'm using Windows, which is interesting. I've never used a Windows PC outside of a Kinkos, let alone owned one...
I think you exemplify the fundamental open source attitude, namely that only people who know how to code deserve to have a working computer, and everyone else has to pay through the nose that the coders may deign to help them. The fantasy is world where the IT dweeb becomes the overpaid fat-cat and the right to compute is really a privilege delegated by a priesthood.
At this point one might point out that if you can't watch Hulu or Netflix (we're talking about OpenSUSE here), cannot put in a credit card number to buy or rent a movie from Amazon Unbox or iTunes, and must install separate pieces of software in order to watch DVDs, this OS may not be "broken" but it might not really be meeting modern consumer expectations.
Of course you could argue they shouldn't be paying money for content, and that the DRM is illiberal or something, but you're still keeping the customer from doing what they want to do and what other platforms don't think twice about forbidding for what are essentially elitist moral reasons.
To me the bigger question is: can Linux systems cater to the average end-user who has no intention of ever understanding how the system works, without losing everything I love about Linux?
Ubuntu? I think you can definitely build a distribution that's user friendly, but the problems most people have are support for certain kinds of hardware and availability of certain applications. In both cases, proprietary OS vendors basically pay off hardware vendors or make partnership deals to make sure hardware isn't a problem -- this isn't really an option for a Linux distribution. On the application side, you have that whole installed base chicken-and-egg problem, and for the new mobile OSs people sell now, open or not, the major companies championing them, be they HP, RIM, Apple or Google all do a ton of legwork to induce app developers to their platform, by running app stores with co-branded distribution and advertising.
Linux distros do a lot to help free software projects get distributed, but I've never seen a Linux distro lift a finger to try to help a developer make money off a sale. Linux business models generally live in denial of the possibility of selling software for money so they don't tend to attract that kind of developer, for better and worse.
Well, that and the fact that Linux has no stable kernel ABI, partly to make it "agile" and partly to punish video card and other hardware vendors for not having the open source religion.
When did I ever say the competitor had to be more expensive? It can be free, all that matters is the google can outwait or outspend the competitor. H.264 will probably survive this, but a real casualty of this is Vorbis.
I think your brain hurts because he reflexivly assume that anything tha tis open source is virtuous and gives everyone everything they may want. The fact is that it almost never delivers viable consumer solutions, unless the project is the pet of a huge private company that shelters it's development and steers business it's way.
I think Google is interested in providing the bare minimum quality required to keep the hits to youtube where they are. That is the extent of their commitment. Making 250,000 people with cellphones happy is far more important to them than making one filmmaker happy.
Also, I take issue with this: "people might invent better codecs...bring them to market." Do you bring equations to market? No, of course not. You bring products to market.
Software is a product. That's just where I come from on this one.
Charging for encoding/decoding is a doomed business model and it deserves to be for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the age-old data format lock-in that companies more interested in profit than innovation (the very ones you are defending) have been pushing for years.
If you think an open-source codec will save you from lock-in you are mistaken. The locks will just move up the pipeline, to different parts of the business. The people who make the content will be the ones forced to use essentially whatever is the monoculture, because using a different standard will become impractical.
That's what I and many other people here are trying to tell you -- open-sourced code is immune to this kind of treatment, because it can't be taken back or controlled; and when it grows large enough to attract a plurality of development, it becomes strong just on the basis of people not wasting time reinventing the wheel and instead contributing their effort to new frontiers.
But you can't control YouTube or Hulu or a Roku. These are services and products, not code. You can hit "git push" until your keyboard breaks but it won't create a viable competitor to YouTube; just because the codec is "free" doesn't mean it's any easier for competitors to create their own sites, services, and codecs, in fact it makes it harder. Open source is great, but it tends to create monocultures where competition on price is impossible, thus the revenue ends up being derived from services. The end result is a situation like Mozilla's, which Google basically owns at this point, they're utterly beholden to them for search referral revenue. Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.
Marginal cost != cost of production, and even if it were, that would be for an intellectual resource with no physical manifestation, that is never updated, and never serviced. Are you seriously claiming that Google spends zero dollars on the development, maintenance and support of Android?
Android does accept input and patches. Not only have bugs I've filed been fixed, at least one of my recommended patches are now running in Android; which was first adopted by third party roms.
Never said they didn't. They love it when people do their work for them for free!
Android absolutely is open source in the most literal sense.
It most certainly is, I never said it isn't. It's a bullshit kind of opensourcing, but that's just a qualification.
Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant or an idiot with an agenda.
You should restrict your comments to things I actually say.
With your idiotic logic, Linux isn't open source because we don't all have the source and/or input into the bios and firmware of all the installed components.
My "logic" has nothing to do with the definition of open source, it's based on competition. Google didn't want to compete with Symbian, Windows Mobile, or RIM, thus they released a phone OS for free, and now Symbian and Windows Mobile are dead, and RIM wheezes. This is all about eliminating competition through market dumping, except instead of China dumping cheap steel in order to bankrupt US producers, Google is dumping a free OS in order to destroy the cellphone OS producers. If you release your product for free you don't have to provide a good product, because anyone who wants to actually make money from people who would pay for it will never be able to enter the market. Once Google's "free" product is entrenched, it becomes impossible to make money selling or improving a competing OS, and competitors wither away, unless they bind their hardware to their OS and use sales of one to subsidize the other, like HP and Apple. Consumers no longer have a choice of OS, because there's really only one game in town for their phone, and entrepreneurs who want to create a new OS face the proposition of having it lose millions of dollars a year before breaking even, and significant barriers to entry among the hardware vendors -- they've invested so much in Android, Google gives them a good cut of the side revenues, lets them put their crapware and efused bioses on them, etc.
In general, as with so many of Google's ventures, they've perverted the competition for consumer purchases -- they simply give great service until they are the monoculture, and then the service to the consumer is indifferently better or worse, but people keep coming because it's the only realistic game in town, and Google then moves to the moneymaking: brokering consumers to content and service providers, taking their cut along the way.
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Yeah, why don't they just put Android on it. And airgap it from the drivetrain and power management.
Aren't you moving the goalposts there? First it was 'real world' web browsing on a Nexus S, and now it's load times (and not even that, just the timing of the callback) in a UI widget.
I'd expect them to only make comments on things they know about, instead of asserting that fact A is proof of proposition B. These people are playing for media attention and using Android fanboyism to get their URL on as many pages as possible. Behold the birth of a profiteer's meme.
I think you don't understand the problem. The headline is "Android's browser is faster than iPhone's browser," but all they ever tested was:
UIWebView is not Safari, and neither WebView nor UIWebView are "browsers."
To go to the trouble of testing the thing with their own app, then testing Safari, publishing the numbers for their own app and not publishing the benchmark for Safari seems obtuse in the extreme. Just tell us the numbers you got for the browser.
A web browser renders content and loads it as well as executing stuff; javascript is only one part of the whole operation and only pertains to certain use cases.
Why estimate when they can just run a benchmark on the actual browser, instead of handwaving?
The studios would not be rewarded ... most people don't particularly understand what DRM is, and only rarely encounter it preventing them from watching a movie, and instead of making peace with a few torrenters it would just cause everybody to rip everything all the time. A consumer, who would otherwise be disposed to pay for a movie, would suddenly ask themselves "Why should I pay for a movie when a thousand kids on the local university campus just share it for free among themselves?" People don't respect corporations for letting information free, they just exploit them.
Very few consumers download torrents to avoid iTunes, CSS or the MPEG-LA, these are just boogeymen of free speech zealots. The vast majority of torrenters just want a movie for a very low price (the cost of their internet connection and their time downloading) or to time- and place-shift their watching, to their mobile devices, to their hard drives, etc. If a media distributor, free or paying, TPB or Sony Pictures, can address these needs on the part of the consumer they'll win. Eliminating media portals and stores, CSS, or licensed codecs would be an utter waste of time, because the consumer knowledge of these things is extremely low and all of these technologies work great for a paying customer.
It depends on where you're trying to hit on the price-value continuum -- some people want to own a movie but $20 seems too expensive, some people don't mind $20 for a good experience and some people are just cranks who want to steal things. The studios would do very well to release their torrents on their own sites, with branding and Web 2.0 and linking to IMDB and all that good stuff, along with the sort of library depth that pirate torrent sites simply could never meet. Eventually with appropriate marketing people would go to the studio's torrents, because they were the fastest, most convenient, offered the best selection and you didn't have to look over your shoulder for the MPAA.
What would be clever is releasing the Divx on a torrent, but making the torren pan-and-scan and standard def, mono audio, burned in French subtitles, and corrupt the datastream a little so that every few minutes the picture hangs. Such a torrent might be "good enough" for people that wanted to casually watch the movie, and would divert them from a better pirated copies, particularly if you made sure it was very easy to find, but would be unacceptable if you actually wanted to enjoy watching the movie, and would stimulate you to go buy the real one.
FWIW I keep my 200 gig sound effects library in Apple Lossless, I'm really not concerned about lockin in the near term. OTOH, my remote archives, the things that would take a month to download and re-encode, are FLAC'd, GPGd and DARd and PARd. I haven't really noticed a significant performance difference from either, though the systemwide metadata support (It is just an MP4 container) and auditioning in the OS for ALAC breaks the tie for me, for now.
As others have pointed out, Apple really doesn't make any profit from the iTunes business, they just make it available as an inducement to buying iThings -- people want iThings, but they actually want movies, books and videos more, and those things draw people to iThings. They key insight behind the pitching of these devices is the realization that people want content, and an iPod is just an Archos unless you put a store behind it. You can sell on the media you want to iThing owners, as long as you do the whole transaction over the web and don't rely on the platform to do DRM.
I don't know if that justifies the 30% thing, but we'll just see what they can get away with. The dream scenario for Apple is the studios go to the Android media markets, pay lower rates to sell on those, but the "openness" of Android allows the customers to use DRM ripping technology willynilly on the platform, causing the content distros to return to Apple, chastened, swearing never to allow their content on an open platform again. Apple's extracting a high tariff but they provide a protected pipeline, something I'm not sure any Android device will ever do. I'm really curious to see what WebOS does.
The dynamic on the Android phones is similar. If Android users ever begin to systematically circumvent call or SMS billing with VOIP, the phone providers won't play along.
I suspect the sort of hardware Samsung and Moto have to squeeze into a tablet, in order to compete with an iPad on performance, says more about Android than it does about Apple.
I guess you're writing from inside an Einstein-Rosen Bridge and locally 3.5 inches and 10.1 inches appear to be the same length.
Red Book uses cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon codes, to the extent that about a quarter of the pits and lands on a CD are redundant; Yellow Book in this regard is identical. CDs have ample error correction, and this dosen't include the informational redundancy of PCM, which can allow linear and polynomial interpolation of dropouts.
Something Red Book does lack is a whole-disk or whole-song consistency check, but if that check doesn't allow reconstruction or repair, it's of questionable utility. CDs are a tolerant medium for a noisy world and were designed before anyone cared if their song's SHA-1 always hashed to the same value, and to this day anyone could care less. "cdparanoia" has "paranoia" in it's name for a reason-- it provides precision bordering on psychosis.
Is ALAC open? I know there's a reverse-engineered codec that's open, but I don't think Apple's lossless coder is in fact open or libre. If TFA says otherwise they may be misinformed.
To be honest, I think you're rationalizing and this assertion doesn't reflect reality, not as much as it used to, particularly if Windows and OSX definitively have the feature X and Linux does not.
Yeah I know. Just tell me where I can put in the credentials for my Google Checkout account so the downloaders can pay my licensing fee.
That's sortof the central trick though... if your business model works on a pay-per-user license, you can finance the development of one new package with the income from thousands of customers. The alternative, when you give away the software, is that one user or syndicate ends up in the catbird seat of financing all the development. If you'll notice, all of the successful, best-of-class OSS applications and systems that you can get now are in fact paid for by huge corporations, or are based on code and man-hours from moribund closed-source projects, and most of the ongoing labor comes from support and tweak enhancements.
The narrative, wherein a single coder has an itch to scratch, assembles hundreds of unpaid individuals around the world and delivers the best package you can get, is a myth. Most OSS projects you can name nowadays, and just about all consumer-facing ones, owe their refinement to large corporate sugar-daddies, present or historical, that dump(ed) man-hours into refining the projects to their needs, while simultaneously using those projects' very free-ness to deny markets to their competitors. The only exception I can think of at this time is ASF, but even they are deeply dependent on financial sponsorship from Google, Microsoft and Facebook. It suits these corps to have a free web server out there -- it means they can compete on providing plugins and services to sell their own attempts to separate users from their money and increasingly, their data.
My argument is that I want a product that has one predictable price, and once paid it works like any other tool. The open source business model is about selling services to make products that only work well enough to keep you buying more services -- Shuttleworth can engage in all the altruism he pleases but eventually someone needs to pay their bills, and for devs services on Linux are the only option. I don't want a serf, but if you decide a priori that shrinkwrapped software is forbidden, it becomes impossible to retail a "just works" solution; you're stuck paying the $100/hour guy who rolls his eyes at you all the time. I mean, this is your pitch for consumer Linux: it's free but your costs for support of X that Windows and OSX have will either cost you $unknown or $MAX_INT, if the feature is in forbidden by "stupid laws." Why would anyone take that deal? If you cannot yourself code, the continuing free-as-in-freedom benefits of Linux are meaningless.
Everybody here assumes I'm using Windows, which is interesting. I've never used a Windows PC outside of a Kinkos, let alone owned one...
There goes the lower TCO I guess.
I think you exemplify the fundamental open source attitude, namely that only people who know how to code deserve to have a working computer, and everyone else has to pay through the nose that the coders may deign to help them. The fantasy is world where the IT dweeb becomes the overpaid fat-cat and the right to compute is really a privilege delegated by a priesthood.
At this point one might point out that if you can't watch Hulu or Netflix (we're talking about OpenSUSE here), cannot put in a credit card number to buy or rent a movie from Amazon Unbox or iTunes, and must install separate pieces of software in order to watch DVDs, this OS may not be "broken" but it might not really be meeting modern consumer expectations.
Of course you could argue they shouldn't be paying money for content, and that the DRM is illiberal or something, but you're still keeping the customer from doing what they want to do and what other platforms don't think twice about forbidding for what are essentially elitist moral reasons.
If you can get my M-Audio Solo working with ALSA and jackd, and my BlackMagic DeckLink working on Ubuntu, let me know.
Ubuntu? I think you can definitely build a distribution that's user friendly, but the problems most people have are support for certain kinds of hardware and availability of certain applications. In both cases, proprietary OS vendors basically pay off hardware vendors or make partnership deals to make sure hardware isn't a problem -- this isn't really an option for a Linux distribution. On the application side, you have that whole installed base chicken-and-egg problem, and for the new mobile OSs people sell now, open or not, the major companies championing them, be they HP, RIM, Apple or Google all do a ton of legwork to induce app developers to their platform, by running app stores with co-branded distribution and advertising.
Linux distros do a lot to help free software projects get distributed, but I've never seen a Linux distro lift a finger to try to help a developer make money off a sale. Linux business models generally live in denial of the possibility of selling software for money so they don't tend to attract that kind of developer, for better and worse.
Well, that and the fact that Linux has no stable kernel ABI, partly to make it "agile" and partly to punish video card and other hardware vendors for not having the open source religion.
There is also an open source Flash runtime called "Gordon" that reads the SWF and executes the animation and events in a <canvas> element.
I think your brain hurts because he reflexivly assume that anything tha tis open source is virtuous and gives everyone everything they may want. The fact is that it almost never delivers viable consumer solutions, unless the project is the pet of a huge private company that shelters it's development and steers business it's way.
I think Google is interested in providing the bare minimum quality required to keep the hits to youtube where they are. That is the extent of their commitment. Making 250,000 people with cellphones happy is far more important to them than making one filmmaker happy.
Software is a product. That's just where I come from on this one.
If you think an open-source codec will save you from lock-in you are mistaken. The locks will just move up the pipeline, to different parts of the business. The people who make the content will be the ones forced to use essentially whatever is the monoculture, because using a different standard will become impractical.
But you can't control YouTube or Hulu or a Roku. These are services and products, not code. You can hit "git push" until your keyboard breaks but it won't create a viable competitor to YouTube; just because the codec is "free" doesn't mean it's any easier for competitors to create their own sites, services, and codecs, in fact it makes it harder. Open source is great, but it tends to create monocultures where competition on price is impossible, thus the revenue ends up being derived from services. The end result is a situation like Mozilla's, which Google basically owns at this point, they're utterly beholden to them for search referral revenue. Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.
Marginal cost != cost of production, and even if it were, that would be for an intellectual resource with no physical manifestation, that is never updated, and never serviced. Are you seriously claiming that Google spends zero dollars on the development, maintenance and support of Android?
Where? Demonstrate:
Never said they didn't. They love it when people do their work for them for free!
It most certainly is, I never said it isn't. It's a bullshit kind of opensourcing, but that's just a qualification.
You should restrict your comments to things I actually say.
My "logic" has nothing to do with the definition of open source, it's based on competition. Google didn't want to compete with Symbian, Windows Mobile, or RIM, thus they released a phone OS for free, and now Symbian and Windows Mobile are dead, and RIM wheezes. This is all about eliminating competition through market dumping, except instead of China dumping cheap steel in order to bankrupt US producers, Google is dumping a free OS in order to destroy the cellphone OS producers. If you release your product for free you don't have to provide a good product, because anyone who wants to actually make money from people who would pay for it will never be able to enter the market. Once Google's "free" product is entrenched, it becomes impossible to make money selling or improving a competing OS, and competitors wither away, unless they bind their hardware to their OS and use sales of one to subsidize the other, like HP and Apple. Consumers no longer have a choice of OS, because there's really only one game in town for their phone, and entrepreneurs who want to create a new OS face the proposition of having it lose millions of dollars a year before breaking even, and significant barriers to entry among the hardware vendors -- they've invested so much in Android, Google gives them a good cut of the side revenues, lets them put their crapware and efused bioses on them, etc.
In general, as with so many of Google's ventures, they've perverted the competition for consumer purchases -- they simply give great service until they are the monoculture, and then the service to the consumer is indifferently better or worse, but people keep coming because it's the only realistic game in town, and Google then moves to the moneymaking: brokering consumers to content and service providers, taking their cut along the way.