On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 9:03 AM, behrouz khosravi <bz.khosr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I love to get ride of android altogether! > I would love to see a platform open enough that I am able to install my > bootloader on it easily and boot what I prefer using a usb flash memory. > This is what I consider as the linux or more appropriately free software > ecosystem.
It sounds like your problem isn't with Android (which is mostly FOSS - or at least the parts you're dealing with here are), but with the bootloader on your phone (which is proprietary). A vendor can just as easily lock down a PC so that it will only run a version of Ubuntu 14 that they issue, without a lot of hacking away at it (and that is only possible because Ubuntu isn't really designed to be secure against such things - if they went to something with a signed /usr and noexec everything else and used kernel signature verification then you're fully locked in). > I dont know whay we are not there yet, touch screen is just another input > device, baseband modulator and demodulators are just another device attached > to the CPU. > FOSS developers seem to mostly be stuck in X11-land - it scratches their itch which tends to be on the desktop. While touch screen is "just another input device" the fact is that you need to design your entire application UI around it. Likewise there are a lot of other considerations when going mobile, like syncronization of data. A lot of FOSS software isn't really designed around a paradigm of working with the same data with multiple devices. There is no cloud equivalent to LibreOffice yet either. Another challenge is that our most popular licenses (GPL) are designed around desktop applications and not the cloud. That means that I can take LibreOffice, make a million changes, give it a web UI, launch a Google Docs competitor, and not release the source code to anybody, since I'm not redistributing the binary. So, when companies do leverage FOSS in the cloud we don't get the benefits. If everybody exclusively used AGPLv3 for their work, then we'd probably see a lot more FOSS investment in cloud-based software. -- Rich
