What else out there is closer? That has a remote chance of being successful?
Completely irrelevant. If I say a donkey is not a horse and you then say "Yes, but it's closer than a manatee!" the donkey doesn't suddenly become a horse. Successfulness also really has no relevance to whether or not it's free.
What's missing? Some drivers and firmware? The RMS quote is, from above, "The shortest path to making it possible to run a smartphone without non-free software is to reverse engineer those non-free drivers or firmware and write free replacements", which to me indicates that Android is fairly close. He is not saying "the shortest path is to go write something else from scratch" or "gee, it's not really free yet, so I'll buy a shiny iPhone because... what the heck, I owe it to myself and I'm tired of harping about this free software bullshit anyway".
As a kernel developer I'll just say that my opinion is that this is a monumental task that says that Android is about as far away as any other embedded proprietary Linux-based device (including the Nokia phones).
Edit: That should be not including the Nokia phones. The Nokia Maemo phones are far easier to deal with than the Android phones.
> Completely irrelevant. If I say a donkey is not a horse and you then say "Yes, but it's closer than a manatee!" the donkey doesn't suddenly become a horse. Successfulness also really has no relevance to whether or not it's free.
First of all, I'm talking about the percentage of the source code and the system created from it, not about animals. We're all technical here, so let's not go off on tangents.
That said, it's a compromise. I want something that is open, and I want something that is reasonably widespread, and I want something that works well, because of the positive network externalities inherent in much of the software world. I'm ok with not 100% open and not the market leader - indeed, I'm fairly biased towards open, being an Ubuntu user (even though that is not 100%).
Beyond what I want, a completely free system is useless if no one produces actual hardware for it, so I think Android's compromises are good ones in that direction. Perhaps RMS does not agree, but that's his right.
What is so 'monumental' about the drivers and firmware that are missing?
I think you are discounting the value of the GUI and user space stuff, which is given to you under a free license with Android. Recreating that stuff would be a monumental task in and of itself.
Completely irrelevant. If I say a donkey is not a
horse and you then say "Yes, but it's closer than a
manatee!" the donkey doesn't suddenly become a horse
You can use a donkey to almost the same chores as a horse, you can even mate a donkey with a horse.
So this particular point is completely irrelevant ;)
As a kernel developer ... Android is about as far away
as any other embedded proprietary Linux-based device.
You've got to give some concrete facts here, as this is too vague.
You can use a donkey to almost the same chores as a horse, you can even mate a donkey with a horse.
I'm not going to play the semantics game, I'm relying on the reader to not be dense.
You've got to give some concrete facts here, as this is too vague.
OK, to give an example of a problem of similar scope, the first thing that has to be done is root the phone. Luckily, we have a canonical equivalent to bypassing the digital signed software -- Tivo. Tivo was basically the same deal. In order to load your nonsigned code into the firmware of the device, one first needed to find a security hole and exploit it. From there one would have to recreate the necessary drivers and such. This would essentially be equivalent to the effort to reverse engineer the Broadcom wireless drivers, which is still not complete (partially because I think they recently announced their intention to release at least some source code).
An example of a device which directly contradicts davidw's statement that Android is the most free smartphone is the Nokia N900. The development work needed to customize the N900 is a fraction of that of the Android platform.
> davidw's statement that Android is the most free smartphone
davidw didn't say that. What I said is that overall, I think Android is our best bet for something that's free, but also "matters". OpenMoko is quite free, for instance, but doesn't really matter - no one will ever use it. I honestly don't have a good idea about what's in MeeGo, how free it is, how much it's possible to tweak the installation on the phone, and so on.
> I'm not going to play the semantics game, I'm relying on the reader to not be dense.
You are the one who brought the zoo into it. The rest of us were talking about mobile phone software.
Also, in terms of their DNA, a donkey is far closer to a horse than a manatee is, if you really want to get into comparisons of animals...
Both you and bad_user are completely missing the point. The idea is that "openness" is not a universal. The statement 'X is more open than Y' does not hold unless you define open. I agree that your definition of open does indeed categorize Android as more 'open' than some competitors.
However, the notion that you can simply say that Android is more open than the iPhone, universally, is simply untrue. I'm attempting to promote a semblance of formal statement here, wherein the parties actually state their axioms as opposed to making otherwise semantically meaningless statements like 'Android is more open than iPhone'.
Where can I download the source code for the iPhone's UI?
Does iPhone have anything like Android's intents that allows me to plug my own stuff in?
Can I install my own applications on my own damn phone without paying Apple?
There may be some metric where iPhone is more open than Android, but I can't think of it.
There are plenty of nice things to be said about the iPhone: it really changed the phone game, it's beautiful, well designed, and so on. But 'open' and 'free' aren't really words I'd associate with it.
Completely irrelevant. If I say a donkey is not a horse and you then say "Yes, but it's closer than a manatee!" the donkey doesn't suddenly become a horse. Successfulness also really has no relevance to whether or not it's free.
What's missing? Some drivers and firmware? The RMS quote is, from above, "The shortest path to making it possible to run a smartphone without non-free software is to reverse engineer those non-free drivers or firmware and write free replacements", which to me indicates that Android is fairly close. He is not saying "the shortest path is to go write something else from scratch" or "gee, it's not really free yet, so I'll buy a shiny iPhone because... what the heck, I owe it to myself and I'm tired of harping about this free software bullshit anyway".
As a kernel developer I'll just say that my opinion is that this is a monumental task that says that Android is about as far away as any other embedded proprietary Linux-based device (including the Nokia phones).
Edit: That should be not including the Nokia phones. The Nokia Maemo phones are far easier to deal with than the Android phones.