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Comment by mah4k4l | Hacker News Reader

Maybe off-topic but what I would really love to see would be for someone to start making BSD based smartphones. It is now easily starting to fit that platform as well not just the PC:s. And BSD lisence would make it possible to make profit in the progress. Free as in freedom. Everything open source. Sandboxed partitions. REAL crypto. No Googler Inside. Stick it to the Man. Everybody wins.

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There was a BSD based smartphone [1], not sure it was any more open a platform than Android though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Hiptop

"Purchased by Microsoft in 2008 for 500M". And then the silence was deafening. Hmm...

Only the last Danger device ran NetBSD; all prior ones used a proprietary, in-house OS. It didn't run any of the normal BSD userland, however, as Danger had its own Java-based userland and UI layer.

Danger was bought by Microsoft, however, right around the time the NetBSD phone was going to market. AFAIK the tech didn't continue much past the Microsoft acquisition. (Source: worked at Danger on the NetBSD project, but left shortly before the Microsoft deal.)

Technically, you could build that on top of Linux, too, just like you could build an Android-lookalike on top of FreeBSD if you wanted to.

That being said, it would be nice, at least if the resulting system exposed more of its Unix guts, but I am not overly optimistic.

Just saying that the BSD license gives you more freedom for commercial activity over GPL. You can literally do what you want with it, sell it as your own product and all. I'm not the engineer type myself (yet), just a holistic thinker who gives a fuck.

I've been spotting BSD embedded in an increasing number of devices -- Playstation 4, Pioneer DJ consoles, hell Mac OS is built on top of it ... my guess is the missing piece is driver (and maybe developer) support

MacOS is not built on top of FreeBSD.

My post specifies BSD... I don't know which flavors the PS4 or pioneer consoles are built on either

I think 4.4BSD on MacOS

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