Android and the false promises of openness
haineault.com
haineault.com
It's always a balance - do you want something you have complete control over, including the possibility to break it, or you want limited control but be sure that even if it breaks, you get a new one? The platform itself is "open enough", but manufacturers and carriers are making a business out of it.
And for the record, I think you can click "clear data", and also use some process monitor to kill your unwanted apps. My facebook app doesn't have these issues
Adding an aftermarket radio doesn't void your warranty. Switching out the muffler for a Cherrybomb doesn't void the warranty. AFAIK the car warranty stays in place for all parts except the parts you change or that interact directly with the warrantied part. ie you lose the engine/transmission warranty if you switch out the ECU but not if you install install an intercooler.
I've rooted a few Android phones and I don't see anything in the software that could physically break the hardware. So I don't understand why the warranty is void. If they don't want to provide tech support to rooted phone, fine. Reinstall OEM Android and get on with it.
Cyanogenmod has some scary clock options. I think you can easily overheat your phone if you get too careless with the processor clock.
Because Verizon conspires with the manufacturers to sell you a phone capable of being 'bricked' in the first place. A proper bootloader doesn't have to be overwritten to install a new system image.
Why is so unreasonable to want to free up some space on the phone by getting rid of (or at least disabling) an app I will never consider using?
Warranty should be void if I am tempering with the hardware.Imagine laptop vendor doing the same if you install Linux on a Windows laptop.
They may refuse to support the software issues but saying warranty is void because you have changed OS is ludicrous.
I imagine they want to be able to cover their ass in case some popular ROM starts causing problems. Their actual actions, as opposed to the what they are theoretically able to do because of the terms you agree to, are pretty reasonable.
I'm pretty sure a laptop vendor would consider your warranty void if you decided to flash your BIOS with something other than an official update.
I could regale you with stories of how a large server vendor, name rhymes with "Hell", refuses to support a class of its iSCSI storage devices on its own hardware if you're not running, say, a specific Linux distribution, rhymes with "R-HEL", and will give you rather nasty time if you try to, say, get support based on a near-identical community enterprise operating system based on the same sources.
The reasons probably boil down to marketing affiliations between "Hell Computers" and "Dead Rat", but (especially in light of prevarication on the part of Hell's salesforce regarding support) it doesn't make for a particularly rewarding support story.
The further truth is that Hell hath relatively little competence in OS-level support, and will simply hand you off to R-HEL's own techs if you go past a level1/2 script. But Hell won't actually come out and tell you this.
Point being: warranty / support is effectively voided based on OS choice. Despite vendor supporting the same OS on other products / in other contexts. And in fact using that OS for several of their own support services/products/offerings.
Open device? With them buying Motorola?
Other countries, you buy your phone, you lease your service. Owning your phone, you can do anything you like with it.
Sometimes telcos (such as Telstra) will 'pitch in' and pay some of your repayments for you.
Generally people use FOSS (Free Open Source Software) as the term to coin the meaning: "its open source, without compromises. It will never be closed, even for a while. AKA it's open source AND free as in freedom - yours - not the companies".
Ends up in a BSD (pro for companies) vs GPL (pro for the users) fight usually. You'd think most would prefer GPL, but many of us actually work for companies and vote BSD (or similar) because it helps the hand that feed them. (I certainly vote GPL)
The GPLv3 added some more depth to the understanding of FOSS - it's been criticized, also by M. Torvalds, who's getting most contributions from people working for said companies. The level of depth is simple: not only the software code must be available, possible to build and reproduce, but you must be able to do that on your device, that one which you own.
It's all about power and control. They want to control you. Eg, have Facebook installed and potentially running even if you don't use it. That's control. That your warranty becomes void if you root the phone, that's for control too. They don't want you to be in control. That's a good part of what FOSS is about: ensure that you stay in control. And that's also what simple OSS (Open Source Software) does not provide.
An I think that's important for our future, as software takes a big part of our lives.
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/open_source-free_software-what_we_...
MeeGo had the potential to provide a better-governed alternative, but that was unfortunately squandered
If you really want the open Android you have to get a phone with an unlocked bootloader and compile AOSP for yourself. Then you can remove or add whatever you want.
But it's early to be complaining. The OSS revolution on PC hardware didn't happen overnight. We now live in somewhat of a golden age where people can run 100% open software on their PCs, and in a lot of cases it also "Just works". I hope Android continues to mature in that direction such that, eventually, it will be a matter of selecting a distro and installing it on your phone (and getting exactly the behavior you want from your phone).
Today you can run a custom ROM, but it is pretty hacky, involving trolling forums and downloading a few zipfiles and hoping they will unpack and run correctly. (And "rooting" your phone.) And it can go horribly wrong (I seem to have damaged the "download mode" on my phone the last time around, but fortunately I've ended up with a stable 2.2 system). In a couple years time, I'm hoping the landscape will look a little more like the Linux/PC world we have now. It may be that we'll have to stop hoping Google will be our benevolent dictator and form an independent Android OSS community, though.
This is an open source project that hasn't done a code release for the last few versions (covering almost a year) and is tightening the licensing agreements to exert control (and doing so in such a way that anyone who isn't a proper licensee will struggle to compete).
Yes they've said that they'll open it up again once Ice Cream Sandwich is out but I'm unconvinced by a company who close off the source as and when it suits them. It feels closer to some sort of "shared source" model than open source.
It might be better than the Apple iOS / Microsoft Windows Phone model (though I'm not 100% clear exactly how much better) but it seems to stop a long, long way short of the ideal.
EDIT: Sorry, being a bit unclear in what I mean by shared source. I was trying to differentiate between projects than run in a open / collaborative way and those where they just publish the code after the event. I wasn't aware that shared source had already been coined to describe a particular model.
Shared-source (as defined by Microsoft's licenses) is strictly about the right to see the source-code, but not touch it.
Free Software is strictly about empowering end-users to make and share derivate works and less about anything else.
This has important ramifications - the pure open-source licenses with no other agendas, like the BSD and Apache, do give you unlimited freedom, including the freedom to not release improvements / new versions.
Basically if you're not happy, you can take Android 2.x and fork it. As an individual developer, you may not have the resources, time or capacity to do that, but Amazon just did.
That's as far from shared-source as you can get btw ;)
But I maintain the gist of my complain - right now you can take Android 2.x and fork it, but you can't take 3.x and fork it. Nothing after that has been opened because Google decided that it didn't suit them.
There may be some adherence to open but I feel uneasy about a project that is open when it suits the parent company but not when it doesn't.
A product is open-source if it comes with an OSI approved license, which grants you several liberties not available with other license models (like Shared Source from Microsoft). At this point in time Android 2.x is open-source, while 3.x is not.
I do agree with you, I am quite sure Google has delayed the release of 3.x because of Amazon's Kindle Fire, which is really not how open-source should work.
On the other hand, I still have hope because 2.x is for the moment good enough, the genie is already out of the bottle, and if Google betrays the community in the end, I'm sure there are others willing to pick up 2.x and develop from there.
what? Honeycomb's source (and only the ONE revision of Android) was not released and I can spout off the three most popular theories, but it doesn't really matter. We've been round and round this many times. If Google chooses to skip releasing 3.0 source, why is that particularly different than me choosing to develop on my own private Git repo and jump from version 1.0 to 3.0 while only releasing 2.0 in binary form. Is it "less" open source? Depends on how you want to define "is" and "open source" I suppose, but I'm inclined to enjoy it. As far as I'm concerned it's "open source enough", in that both my D1 and Fascinate are running fully open source operating systems (aside from proprietary drivers obviously).
>is tightening the licensing agreements to exert control (and doing so in such a way that anyone who isn't a proper licensee will struggle to compete).
Um, no they're not. The licenses are the same for both AOSP and the terms for getting Google Apps are the same still.
Not much of this post is factual. Like, hardly if any of it is.
-- tl;dr Google fails to release code for ONE revision of Android and has the exact same licensing terms for AOSP and Google Apps as always. And I get downvoted. Cool.
This simply means the next version of Android might or might not be open source. Then the next, next one too.
It means also, if in 2 years 99% of the market runs Android and Google decides to take several choices that users may object about, they can just close the source forever.
Of course, since its not GPL licensed, they could always close the source forever - even if they had open sourced the OS every time in the past (but they did not.).
So it's about trust, and the trust is gone.
In the same light as something another poster alludes to: AOSP 1.0, 1.1, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 4.0 (and associated minor revisions) are all known to be open source releases. Honeycomb stands as a sole exception that, again, Google has said will not occur again.
um - they're not exactly the first company to develop a commercial offering on top of an earlier open-source offering. So I'm not sure what your point here is.
As I understand it, an open source license allows you to get the code to software you are _already running_ not some commitment by the producer to release future versions of the software under an open license in perpetuity.
>> Of course, since its not GPL licensed, they could always close the source forever - even if they had open sourced the OS every time in the past
As I understand the GPL, even if current versions of Android were GPL'd, future versions would not necessarily be so, since the only person affected would be the copyright holder.
IANAL but since Google holds the copyright for Android code, they'd be free to license it under some other license as well, and then derive from that. This seems to be very common in open source projects (dual licensing I mean).
In short - an Open Source license gives you access to current, not future, code. And the copyright holder of the code can release derived versions which are not Open Source.
Is it less open source? Yes, as far as Honeycomb is concerned the source wasn't opened so it's not open source at all. If you don't share the source, it's not open source, period.
Whether it's "enough" very much depends on what you want from an open source project. You think it is, that's fine but for me, given how committed Google are meant to be to open source, I don't think they should be picking and choosing. At the very least I'd have liked a commitment that they'd make it open at the same point ICS was made open so people could buy a Honeycomb tablet confident that they could get access to the code in the future if they wanted or needed it.
>> is tightening the licensing agreements to exert control (and doing so in such a way that anyone who isn't a proper licensee will struggle to compete). > Um, no they're not.
"Over the past few months, according to several people familiar with the matter, Google has been demanding that Android licensees abide by "non-fragmentation clauses" that give Google the final say on how they can tweak the Android code—to make new interfaces and add services—and in some cases whom they can partner with."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_15/b42230412...
Looks like tightening the licensing terms to me.
Don't get me wrong, I don't dispute Google's right to do this and I don't necessarily think that it's a bad thing for Android, I just don't think it's a very "open" thing to be doing.
Google can do what they like with Android but if they want to get the credit and kudos that rightly goes with an open source project, they need to accept that there is going to be criticism when they start moving the goal posts.
Heck, the comments there do a plenty good job of describing what I've just detailed. Besides, rooting and custom firmwares are not illegal and most of the time will not stand up in court as warranty violations (at least surely not outside of the United States).
This means that Android itself is not allowing him to remove Facebook (or Twitter), and I'm inclined to agree that it goes against the 'open' label that Google like to put on android.
Having said that, I completely agree that if you want a truly open phone, you can't expect a warranty as well, that would be having your cake and eating it.
"I have to agree that my carrier is more to blame than Google or Android. After all, the facebook app isn't in the android source tree. It was introduced and locked in by my carrier.
My grippe is more about Android being touted left and right as a the first Open mobile platform while when it reaches the end user it's been locked by the carrier.
But indeed, my diatribe should have been more targeted to my carrier."
If not, what is the point of buying the Nexus phones? It's Google's flagship stock Android, isn't it?
Why not? I can order a server from Dell/HP/Lenovo with or without an OS and it's fully warrantied. The TSR won't say, "you installed OpenBSD and now one of your RAM chips is defective? Tough luck!"
Exactly what is in the software that a wipe and restore won't be able to rule out a software problem?
I have no problem with addressing this as a design flaw, but it seems beyond unreasonable to use this as a way to attack Android's openness.
The point remains, he can fork CM's repo right now, make /system/app user read/write-able and go on his marry way deleating whatever he likes.
It's like attacking Ubuntu as being not open, because Gnome-screensaver doesn't let you tweak the screensaver settings (it was among the other dozen features simply removed in the last 3+ years)
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
It's arguable that the ability to install/uninstall a program isn't direction mentioned among these freedoms, but the ability, say, to run the software deletion program for any purpose would fall under that cateogory, and Android fails in this regard.
The Android platform as a whole is most certainly NOT FSF Free Software. There's some free software at the core. I consider my Android phone to be a proprietary product, and one I trust little with my privacy, confidentiality, and/or data integrity.
Unfortunately, it's best-of-breed and "most free" of generally available smartphone software presently, though Meego (or whatever it's being called today) and the Nokia 900 series might be a superior option (I've got my eye on both).