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Comment by chatman | Hacker News Reader

Richard Stallman has been saying this all along. These non-free operating systems are used for surveillance.

Trying to spread Stallman's ideas by FUD does not help spreading Stallman's ideas. Stop doing that.

I don't get why free software zealots hate Android so much. It is by far the most "free" popular operating system ever made. Never has there been a user facing operating system in the possession of 100s of millions of people, for which you can readily download and study the large majority of code running the system on these devices. It is even possible to purge some devices of non-free code (including blobs) completely, if you so desire [1].

[1]: http://www.replicant.us/

I'm sure you know, but rms agrees with you. "Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free software portable phone".

It's nonfree, but better than anything we've ever had, with the possible exception of the couple of GNU/Linux Nokia phones.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.htm...

> Never has there been a user facing operating system in the possession of 100s of millions of people, for which you can readily download and study the large majority of code running the system on these devices.

This is going to be completely off-topic, but most Android installations don't really qualify as "free" as they lack essential freedom to tinker with the code and put it back on the device. Vast majority of Android-based phones are purportedly severely tivoized, and many vendors actively fight any attempts to work around those limitations. That is, having an ability to read the source code doesn't make the software free.

So, on the contrary Android family of OSes (with the exception of AOSP and Replicant) is one of the mostly tightly locked-down computing platforms that has one of the core practices of not letting users accessing anything more than device vendor had allowed. Unsurprisingly, this is frowned upon from many zealots.

That is why I put "free" in quotations. Furthermore, many devices sold do allow you to at least put open source equivalents on them on these devices; many flagship phones allow this with some know-how. On the scale of freedom from 0 to 10 (0 being a Lumia, 10 being the computer that RMS uses), I'd say most Android devices are a 3, with many devices being able to go up to a 6 and some devices going up to an 8 with Replicant.

Nonetheless, people fail to recognize the freedoms that Android does give you, and only criticize the freedoms that it doesn't give - the reasons why it's not a 10. If not for Android, I'd wager we would not be able to go beyond 2 (≈ iOS) on the freedom scale when buying mobile phones. That would be bad, and it seems zealots fail to recognize this (that's probably why they are zealots in the first place).

Why is Lumia a 0? How about iOS and Blackberry?

Richard Stallman has said a lot of things but as per any extremist you need to take all opinions in context to reality.

I used to agree with him but the thousands of hours of arguing with free software make me disinterested in the proposition. I'm willing to trade some of the perceived freedom advantages for practicality and gain more time to so what I want to do, which isn't incidentally wondering why the 50th autoconf run didn't work building gnumeric with a patch because it had a bug.

Google sheets it is...

The problem is that most people aren't even aware they're trading anything. That you consciously made that decision means the movement has already accomplished an important step.

Besides, gnumeric bugs will sound great when Google bans your account for deity knows why :)

Most people aren't interested in the mechanism of anything, just the results. They don't make the concious decision not through education but through apathy and the desire to get from A to B via the shortest path.

As for Google; backups. If my account gets toasted it's a couple of hours inconvenience to set everything up and little else.

What if I told you, that most people do not trade anything? I may have a theory that each time you use GPL you are trading away 17 karma points, but that does not it true.

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