On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 15:05:05 UTC, ketmar via
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:46:33 +0000
Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 11:35:54 UTC, ketmar via
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 07:22:13 +0000
> Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> This is the model used by Android, the most successful open
>> source project ever
> i can assure you that stupid policy with separating features
> has
> nothing to do with android popularity.
I can assure you that it's _the_ reason it took off so much.
If the Android project had insisted on pure open source, the
hardware and smartphone vendors would have laughed at them and
used Windows Mobile or LiMo or one of the myriad other
alternatives at the time.
It's why Samsung has their own proprietary multi-window
implementation for Android and Amazon and Xiaomi forked
Android and released their own proprietary versions.
Commercial vendors want to differentiate with their own
proprietary features, but AOSP provides a common OSS platform
on which they can work together.
This model has been extraordinarily successful for AOSP, as it
has led to a billion smartphones running some version of
Android and capable of running most common apps, albeit with
some fragmentation too.
what you described here is a matter of licensing (BSDL vs GPL),
not
having some closed-source patches.
Which of those OSS licenses are the proprietary features and
blobs I listed offered under? None, and the choice of license is
critical because you cannot offer closed-source patches under the
viral GPL, ie it is the BSDL/Apache permissive licenses that make
this winning mixed model possible.
If your point is that AOSP is released as pure open source, no
Android phone is sold running pure AOSP, including Nexus devices
because of binary blob drivers. Without the proprietary add-ons,
AOSP would be unusable.
