On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 11:44 AM, behrouz khosravi <[email protected]> wrote: >> 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). > > No, actually my problem is that why an operating system > can have decision on what types of apps can I have on my computer. > if it is foss enough why I am not able to remove everything from my system > easily.
If you build/install Android on a device, then it only contains what you put there, and you can just as easily remove it. If you let somebody else build/install android on a device and not give you root access, then it is painful. If you build/install Gentoo on a device, then it only contains what you put there, and you can just as easily remove it. If you let me build/install Gentoo on your device and not give you root access, then it is painful. If you let me reflash the firmware on your Gentoo system so that it uses my UEFI keys and firmware update keys and doesn't let you change them, and I set it up with a bootloader that checks your kernel+initramfs signatures and decrypts the rest of your hard drive using a TPM-supplied key and a verified boot path, and an initramfs that checks the signature on your /usr and mounts everything else noexec, then you're going to have some serious headaches. And yes, you actually can do all of this with Gentoo, though almost nobody bothers (ChromeOS is based on Gentoo and does use a variation on this, with licensed devices having a switch to disable the signature checks). I'd have to check but I think Linux actually supports (maybe via a patch) signature verification on execing images, in which case I can let you mount whatever you want +x and you still won't be able to run your own stuff. Your problem isn't with Android the OS. Your problem is with the experience your phone vendor is giving you. All that lockdown stuff that you seem to hate is 100% supported by the Linux kernel - you're just not turning it on with a typical distro install. > >> 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. ... > > why do you thinks some foss user interfaces can not be created for this > situation? > I'm not saying that they cannot be created. I'm simply pointing out that nobody is bothering to do so. Anybody can write a web-based MUA comparable to Gmail or a web-based replacement to Google Docs, and release it as FOSS. However, it takes a lot of work and for various reasons most seem content to use an X11-based version of each. In the case of LibreOffice I think the origins are actually in software that was intended to be sold commercially, but failed (which is probably why they've been trying to cleanup the code for years). For a mobile OS your life is made even more difficult by Android, since many who would tend to write a competing OS probably consider it good enough. I'm really not interested in yet another android so much as more open hardware to run android on. Vendors are getting better about allowing unlocking, but driver support/etc is still a mess. Oh, and I don't like the general move of APIs into Google Play Services. That really needs to be split into two applications. One would provide APIs for stuff actually related to Google (like Google authentication, buying stuff on the Play Store, Google Wallet, and so on), and that could be closed. The other would provide all the stuff like WebView APIs where rapid updates are desirable, and it should be FOSS. -- Rich
