"look but don't touch" kind of Android openness

[Marko Dimjašević]

Hi all!

On Wed, 2014-10-01 at 20:43 +0200, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
> Le mardi 30 septembre 2014 à 10:49 +0300, dimonik, dimonik a écrit :
> > nice article:
> > http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/
> 
> I am indeed worried to see the free software applications in AOSP being
> discarded by Google as they develop their proprietary enhanced and
> tied-to-their-services versions of these core system applications.

While I highly appreciate what you Paul are doing (are you the only
active Replicant developer at the time?), after reading the article on
Ars Technica I am wondering if the free software community, and in this
particular case the part of it focused on mobile platforms, should be
taking a different approach (though I have no clue what that would be).
The Replicant project has been around for several years, and my question
is - how much has the project been beneficial for the wide mobile
platform community users? Don't get me wrong - I am fully supportive of
the Replicant project, it's just that I'm wondering how much it has
picked up people's imagination and willingness to give it a try, fiddle
with it, patch it, extend it, or maybe even use it on a daily basis.

The problem is that "the other side" has armies of dozens of thousands
of payed developers and we got one single developer (or maybe a few).
Given the complexity of creating a fully free complete software stack
for a mobile platform and the fast pace things are changing in the
field, I was thinking if there's another approach that would get us to
the same goal and how it'd compare to the current state of affairs.


-- 
Regards,
Marko
http://dimjasevic.net/marko