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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla, please don't allow carriers or manufacturers to modify your OS! You need to set the right tone from the very beginning. Otherwise you'll never get that kind of power back later on.

Sell it to them as an alternative to Android. That's all they need to know if they want it or not. If they want more, you can go elsewhere.

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If it's an alternative to Android that doesn't let Carriers "add value" then it's an alternative they won't use. Open Source, in this case, becomes a race to the bottom in every respect.

We need carriers to be dumb pipes we buy data plans from; then this entire class of problem goes away. Until then, any platform that doesn't let carriers charge us different amounts for bits from different places is going to die on the vine.

So how do we curb this voracious appetite of needing to get into every bit (data, apps, ads, other value adds) of being a telco?

I agree with what you're saying, but how do we get to a state where we can have "dumb pipes", yet have an open, privacy driven and easily user controllable OS on a device?

Is there an alternative to always needing to "add value"? Isn't earning our coin off carrier charges, data etc enough?

I think the fundamental problem is the carriers' vertically integrated business model -- Verizon and AT&T want to sell you the phone, the phone service, the data service, the TV service, etc. etc.. From the consumers' point of view we need the actual pipes to be infrastructure then we buy devices that use the pipes, and pay for services that send us stuff over the pipes. But how to get there? Massive government intervention of some kind is probably the only option. Left to the market we'll simply get the biggest most monolithic monopolies that the government allows to form.

>> If it's an alternative to Android that doesn't let Carriers "add value" then it's an alternative they won't use.

Ideally, they shouldn't "use" any phone, because they are not the user. We should buy whatever phone we please somewhere else, with financing if necessary, and then buy service from the carriers. The whole "subsidizing" thing is a scam unless you get cheaper service by bringing your own phone, or after your phone is paid off.

Getting some popular third-party phone vendors in the US and making phone subsidies a line item in your cell phone bill are the first steps toward carriers as dumb pipes and towards true choice in phones.

Here's the real problem: The major carriers charge the same rate regardless of whether you got a free phone from them or not. The phone subsidy doesn't go away even if you paid $500 out of pocket for a Nexus.

My solution: I bought a factory unlocked iPhone 4 from Canada on ebay. I run it with a Straight Talk SIM for $45 a month, no contract, unlimited everything.

How is owning infrastructure anything other than a low-margin hot-potato if you let yourself be turned into a dumb pipe?

Why should owning infrastructure be anything other than low margin?

We are working on that, but there is only so much we can do if we want this to be open. If carriers want to use the Firefox OS branding and our system then there will be certain limitations on what they are expected to do in return.

This is new to us, but I'm confident we'll come up with something satisfactory.

Saying that, we can't stop someone taking the code from GitHub and producing their own non-Fx OS system and not referring to Fx OS.

I think the key is making it easy for users to 'reset' the device to stock FxOS. I would hope the firefox brand was strong enough to keep carriers from releasing their own variants to avoid mozilla's requirements.

Your point about the brand is most important, I think most carriers wouldn't want to start something from scratch. Plus, the Mozilla and Firefox brand brings a lot with it.

This. The Firefox OS license for carriers should be "you can modify our OS however you like, but you must take no steps to keep users from installing a clean one, nor penalize them for doing so."

> This. The Firefox OS license for carriers should be "you can modify our OS however you like, but you must take no steps to keep users from installing a clean one, nor penalize them for doing so."

If Firefox OS is to be open source (OSS-compliant), then you can't impose this sort of restriction.

Why? Mozilla does that today, as does Android- if you don't comply with their guidelines, you can use the code, but not the trademark.

It's open source. Mozilla can't (and shouldn't be able to) prevent carriers and manufacturers from tinkering.

And per the article, one of the benefits of the OS is the ability to modify the GUI and default apps with simple HTML+CSS+JavaScript.

They can prevent them from calling it FirefoxOS, though; in fact, they do just that with regular Firefox (see Iceweasel).

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