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

Bob Summerwill bob at summerwill.net
Wed Oct 1 20:47:42 UTC 2014


Hey Marko,

See earlier thread http://redmine.replicant.us/boards/33/topics/5193 -
"Have you looked at Tizen?"

I have the same hard-to-articulate feeling as you, that Google will be
forever dragging Android in a bad direction, and that it will be impossible
to muster enough effort to counter their "dirty tricks".

I was looking to Tizen as a potential solution for that problem, but since
that original mail thread I have become pretty disillusioned with the state
of the Tizen community, and specifically with the way Samsung are
operating.   It looks like there will finally be some Tizen phones in India
this year, but it might be too little, too late:

http://kitsilanosoftware.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/the-tizen-project-is-broken-we-will-be-spending-some-time-apart-3/

I've switched my own focus to Sailfish:

http://www.mobilelinuxnews.com/2014/08/introduction-mono-sailfish-os-jolla/

Others are backing Firefox OS, or Ubuntu Touch.   All the approaches have
issues with bootloaders, and "binary blobs" and closed drivers and most of
all with proprietary baseband processors, with http://bb.osmocom.org/
seemingly the only counter-balance.

I have the feeling that one of these "true GNU/Linux" approaches will be
the best route to freedom, because it brings the whole stack across, not
just the kernel, and gives the mass of existing GNU/Linux developers a
route to bring their skills to mobile, without having to come under the
control of Google in the process.

I think that side-stepping non-free baseband technology is a sensible
interim step.

I also like everything I am hearing from http://ind.ie.


Cheers,
Bob

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Marko Dimjašević <marko at cs.utah.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Replicant mailing list
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> http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant
>



-- 
bob at summerwill.net
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