Microsoft files EU Android complaint

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 7:56 PM, William Muriithi <
william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> > There were a number of interesting open source smart phone projects
> taking
> > off when android arived.  Now there isn't much left of most of them.
> > After all this wonderful android open source thing is here now, so no
> > need to do these other ones anymore.
>
> Think that would have happened either way. The pure open source projects
> were driven by Nokia and you know what happened to them. So, without
> android, most likely dormant platform would to Windows. I sincerely
> wouldn't think of a scenario we would have come out better.
>
> Yep, I think that's a mighty good point.

Consider what has happened to the "general purpose" operating system
'market'; between Microsoft salting the earth on the academic side, by
hiring away everyone they could that was doing novel OS research (the most
critical name being Rick Raschid, of Mach and CMU fame), and pretty
actively undermining other OS vendors (VMS->WNT, Novell), and Linux
providing a potent "loss leader", there's vanishingly small room in between
for the survival of anything else, certainly not OSes that are sold for a
profit.  (Apple makes their money on other parts of the transaction, much
as is true for all of the remaining UNIX(tm) vendors.)

As much as I liked the idea of OpenMoko, I don't think it was remotely
close to being a mainstream thing.  It is amazing to me that they have done
any further upgrades to the hardware.  It was an interesting proof of
concept, but I'm unsurprised that they're near impossible to buy.

Nokia's flirtation with Linux was also interesting, but they never got
*close* to serious enough to bet any of the company on it.  The moment
things got tough, it was many times more tempting to donate the remains of
their future to Microsoft.

Further, this misses an enormous elephant in the room, namely that the
mobile carriers have history of being dramatically controlling of what they
allow their supplicants^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hcustomers to have in Their
Ultra Proprietary Service.

It took a paranoid control freak like Steve Jobs, defending the "right" to
have a proprietary Apple App Store that wasn't instead a
fully-controlled-and-labelled product of each individual carrier to make
things arguably a lot more "open" than they were before.  (PalmOS was
probably also somewhat involved, tho iPhone was the thing that most visibly
smashed down barriers at the carriers.)

The fact that users of Android phones have a capability altogether to
install packages that weren't distributed to them by the operator of their
mobile network means that there's an "openness" to Android that I don't
have to be squinting sideways to pretend I'm perceiving that indicates that
it, as deployed platform, is orders of magnitude more "free and open" than
things used to be (back in the days pre-iPhone) and generally a lot more
"free and open" than is the case for any of the present mainstream phone
platforms.

That doesn't make Android "free as in 'RMS-would-approve'"; with the broad
rapacity of the mobile carriers, nothing of that sort was ever likely to be
more than a curiosity.  I don't think Maemo was "free enough" for RMS'
purposes, and I'm not sure that OpenMoko was, either, as I expect they
still had proprietary bits as consequence of needing to interface to
proprietary radio hardware and the like.

> >
> > OpenMoko is still kind of around, and looks vaguely tempting, although
> > they sure look stupid.  Who designed that case shape.
>
> What do you think of Tizen? Open source enough in your opinion?  That is
> the only viable alternative I think has money behind to live.
>
I doubt it; that's presumably going to turn out to be filled with Samsung's
"tentacles," and I don't see any reason to think they have a cultural
affinity to produce open source software in the long run (I'm not thinking
of this as a "Korean versus anything else thing; just that Samsung's a
huge, tough-competing conglomerate that's not likely to drop everything to
become all about OSS).

If you require your phone to be "truly totally free software," then:
a) There never have been any mainstream options, OpenMoko being maybe the
nearest, and
b) As long as there are hard-competing mobile carriers prepared to throw
billions of dollars around to try to destroy their opponents, it's unlikely
that any will ever emerge.
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