google, who works harder and harder to sell everything I do to advertisers (now you can't even rate apps w/o a google+ account), and who just shut off transmitting search data so they can screw site owners for more $?
microsoft, who is a party to this and actively worked to make the internet worse (and succeeded!) for the better part of a decade?
or apple, who at least isn't run by and for advertisers?
all choices suck
Android, Chrome, Chrome OS are open-source. Amazon already forked Android. Android is also the only popular mobile operating-system that allows installation of software from third-party sources. And if you use Android, you don't have to buy into Google's services.
In my eyes it doesn't matter that Apple isn't being "run for" advertisers. Because Apple sure as hell isn't operating their business in my interests either.
Chromium is open-source, but lacks various functionality Chrome has (e.g. the PDF reader, and soon I expect playback of Netflix videos, since I doubt Google will be open-sourcing their CDM). Chromium is also supporting Flash via NPAPI, not Pepper, which Google is planning to kill off.
ChromeOS has similar issues with Netflix, at the very least: the open-source parts can't do it.
You forgot about the Google Talk plugin, which was something that was upsetting me personally, but hopefully they'll fulfil their promise of moving to Web RTC.
Note - I'm actually a Firefox user, because when Mozilla wants to improve the state of PDF rendering, they do it in such a way that everybody benefits, i.e. https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
There may not be a perfect option out there with no tradeoffs, but there are options that are far far worse for the industry than others.
The problem is not these companies, it's the regulatory climate. Until we defang technology patents it will remain like this, with only a few tollkeepers who own the market.
But why is the regulatory climate so problematic? I guess it's because our current form of democracy is highly inefficient - politicians have much stronger incentives to do what rich entities represented by lobbying firms want than they have incentives to do what is beneficial for the general public. Bad laws are basically written by those who benefit from them and that's why it takes so long to change the bad laws and that's why the new laws are always half-assed and full of loopholes. This is not going to change any time soon.
The more I think about it the more I think that government regulation is neither fair nor efficient and I wonder... how difficult would it be to partially escape government regulation by creating a distributed company? Think of Linux on Bitcoins. No single entity to sue. Some kind of self-regulation based on millions of stakeholders carefully disconnected from their real-world identities voting with their money or something.
This is just a very vague idea - I am not sure it could solve anything and I am pretty sure that it would create a lot of new problems but I feel it is useful to think about this stuff because we cannot expect governments to efficiently regulate society in a way beneficial to general public. Democracy needs to improve in order to keep up.
No they don't. This is one of those factoids that gains truth through repeated assertion, but it simply isn't true.
I think its the least of evil profit motivations since hell I might actually be interested in what google has figured out I may want... Vs being locked out without any options and force into dealing with a certain player.
But I agree that there is a dilemma. The alternative to ad based business models is to make a payment via a credit card, which identifies me even more directly and is subject to even tighter regulation and potential censorship. In the extreme, I have to deal with companies like Apple enforcing their broken moral standards on my phone.
There are no simple solutions to this I'm afraid.
They have (admittedly less-successful) advertising businesses that they show no signs of abandoning, they boast about the number of accounts and/or the number of credit cards they have for developers and partners and so on.
To a first approximation "everybody" wants your money and "everybody" sells you. Generalizations don't work. You need to look at the bundles that come with products/ecosystems on a case-by-case basis.
(I didn't downvote you by the way. I never downvote)
Firefox OS + ZTE Open: cheap and good battery life (70€ / $80, 2-7 days).
We need a real competitor here with a completely different kind of agenda and, IMO, Mozilla is the competitor to do that. (Yes, I work for Mozilla on Firefox OS, but I'm not just spouting off. It took us a while to get from Mozilla in 1998 to Firefox but we did it and it fixed the browser market. We're getting into phones for the same reason and you can help us fix this market by joining the Mozilla Firefox OS project.)
* support only IE (which they were hoping for of course)
* introduce browser conditionals everywhere
* only use a very limited feature set as the lowest common denominator (leading to table layouts everywhere, using jpg instead of png, never even think about transparency)
This did IMO slow down the development of the web as a whole for quite some time.
I agree all mainstream choices suck, but there are alternatives: FirefoxOS or Ubuntu Phone
I agree open source handsets (as far as they can be) would also be vulnerable to software patent attacks, but we could at least support companies which don't engage in such attacks.