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Keep Android Open

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Re: Keep Android Open

#491

Post by jofla_net »

fooqux wrote: post #358
1gn15 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bank apps: Use an ATM, or a second phone. Enterprise apps: Use a second phone, preferably paid for by work. Government apps: Use a second phone, or refuse to use it (since there's likely elderly whom are not on board yet). Copyrighted media: Piracy.

"just use a second phone" cannot be the answer because 99% of people will just scoff at that. Instead of buying a second phone, why not just buy one that works? And that's to say nothing of the environmental impact.

> "just use a second phone" cannot be the answer

Not That i want to kick the can down the road, but the ultimate solution (barring actually fighting for our privileges over the systems we buy) is to have that second phone, and control it either via vnc, or via a kvm which presents vnc. I know, its really absurd, complexity wise, what with tunneling and figuring out where to house said setup. However, the latter is ultimately transparent to the phone, outside of allowing a second monitor/hid to be connected to it. You could, given a VNC client then go ahead and control it via laptop or another phone.

Re: Keep Android Open

#493

Post by Ajedi32 »

dns_snek wrote: post #479
pyeri wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few companies have done it successfully like Red Hat, Odoo ERP and Sensio Labs (the company that builds Symfony framework).

Yes but notice how all of those are B2B? I was responding in the context of B2C, on one hand we know that people are willing to pay for convenience - Steam has largely beaten piracy by simply offering a better service. But that wouldn't hold up if games were released under a FOSS license. There would be nothing stopping me (maybe trademark law? I'm sure there are workarounds) from setting up "SteamForFree", rehosting…

Fully agree with this sentiment.

I do think though that disallowing "certain types of commercial use" is a poison pill that would prevent your project from getting any significant adoption.

I think a better option would be something like GPL but with the "you can redistribute copies of this to anyone you like without paying me" part stripped out. (Maybe replaced with a provision that allows transferring your license to someone else, but then you're not allowed to use it afterwards.) The goal being to protect consumer freedom to exercise ownership rights over their software (including the ability to modify it) without simultaneously trying to abolish the copyright system and killing your own funding mechanism in the process.

Re: Keep Android Open

#494

Post by keepamovin »

liendolucas wrote: post #283

I'm going to say something that probably will get me down votes: Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives. A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily dr…

You're right. Especially with the rise of agentic AI. You could have hundreds of contributors, all using agents, working on different modules, according to existing spec and tests, create a new OS, or Web Browser or anything. It's the end of monopolistic control of software.

But, I think the giants already know and accept this. The moat now is compute. A centralization of power back to the server, the rise of thin clients, and fat services.

So, it is a revolution but there's also counterbalancing forces. Still, we should ride that wave :)

Re: Keep Android Open

#495

Post by slightwinder »

torben-friis wrote: post #386
slightwinder wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way. To be fair, there are also legit reason for why it evolved this way. It's mainly for quality and reliability. There is so much crappy…

I don't fully agree with that, IMO it's a multifaceted problem. There's the obvious fact that tech has become the new path to high salaries, and culture changes when people are pursuing the money rather than the trade. There's the centralisation and capture of resources - app stores in mobile, message boards moving to reddit then being astroturfed, hardware closing to repairs for water resistance/ form factor reasons…

> I don't fully agree with that, IMO it's a multifaceted problem.

It always is.

> There's the obvious fact that tech has become the new path to high salaries, and culture changes when people are pursuing the money rather than the trade.

There is nothing new about this. Education and skills have always been a path to salaries. Even a thousand years ago, craftsman and artisans had a better career than any random farmer. And with education, there is will always follow standardization and certification at some point, because where money flows, scam grows, and societies have to protect their interests.

This is all nothing new, or harmful by itself. The problem is that all those legit interests, can also be too overprotective or even abused for someone's greed. It's always a balanced battle between legit interests and someone's greed. But many countries seem far to much leaning to the greedy and abusive side at the moment.

> There's also the death of piracy limiting access to resources. Apps, courses and books were files pirated massively, online services kinda stopped that.

Piracy is not dead. It's always been a battle of life and death of individual sources.

Re: Keep Android Open

#496

Post by mindcrime »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #451
torben-friis wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication is the main issue - If you've got whatsapp/telegram/whatever,and a couple others you can handle your own life differently without human interaction being affected. The rest is a personal choice, I'm happy to have a bit higher friction to check my bank's balance for example. Maps is an issue but it can be overcome.

> I'm happy to have a bit higher friction to check my bank's balance for example. I find this to actually be a great litmus test for the overall problem. Bank account balance is a basic piece of information that's about me, and that I need to keep track of to effectively live in our modern times. I should be able to access that information non-interactively at any time. But I can't. Ask many banks, you'll get as many…

It's a trivial and non-critical need, but it's also exemplifying the basic user freedoms being denied to us: the ability to freely process information on my own device.

I hate to risk sounding like I'm beating a dead horse, but when I hear this I flash back to Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. I interpreted his message in that book as something approximately like "you can't out-tech the bad guys", where "bad guys" can mean government surveillance agencies (probably more what he had in mind) OR "big corporations trying to control your life" (this may be me extrapolating). But even if I'm over-generalizing a bit, I think the point still stands.

"We" (open source advocates / hackers / hobbyists / makers / whatever) can't win on just tech alone. We have to use the legislative process, political pressure, social pressure, whatever, to achieve our goals. And so we should use our superior knowledge of technology to support doing that. So don't just think "how can I hack my phone to use an open source OS" but think "How can I help use technology to influence the outcome of the next election, and elect candidates who really represent the things I care about?" or "How can I help use technology to stir up enough activists making enough noise to persuade my bank to let me access my account using a non-proprietary OS", etc.

Now I'm not saying any of this is easy. By no means. Just suggesting that we need to at least approach things with that mindset in view to some extent.

Re: Keep Android Open

#497

Post by AstralStorm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #460
candiddevmike wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think their bank "isn't even trying to be secure"?

Because SMS is not considered a secure 2FA mechanism anymore, and hasn't been for a while. If that's the default for that bank, and not GP going out of their way to pick a legacy access path, then they're about a decade behind what's considered industry standard -- which today is querying a second factor not just per login, but also per important operations (money transfers, dispositions, changes in settings), with t…

Uh, banks still provide separate tokens and one time pad cards last I've heard.

If yours doesn't, pick one that does.

Re: Keep Android Open

#498

Post by zb3 »

preisschild wrote: post #180

Whats also an issue is that Android seemingly has stopped publishing the source code for Android (AOSP). Android 16 QPR1 has been out for months but still no source code released.

They're exremely tight-lipped on this.. many people asked using multiple channels but no response for months.

Re: Keep Android Open

#499

Post by AstralStorm »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #473
TeMPOraL wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because SMS is not considered a secure 2FA mechanism anymore, and hasn't been for a while. If that's the default for that bank, and not GP going out of their way to pick a legacy access path, then they're about a decade behind what's considered industry standard -- which today is querying a second factor not just per login, but also per important operations (money transfers, dispositions, changes in settings), with t…

Then literally every US business and government is not trying to be secure. I cannot name a single organization that does not have the option of or requires SMS 2FA. I think the government and large businesses like it that way, as it makes the mobile network providers as a sort of credit check (or “are you worth dealing with”) mechanism.

Now that is more of a problem than a bank. Which is why someone beeds to integrate OTP tokens into ID cards, closing the issue.

Re: Keep Android Open

#500

Post by luisml77 »

qwertox wrote: post #480
luisml77 wrote: post #477

The discussion between open-source and closed-source is essentially a discussion between communism and capitalism. Anything that reaches a certain threshold of value to society and requires enormous effort to build and maintain has to fall back to a capitalist, for-profit, closed-source structure. That's all that's happening here. Of course, small stuff like a software library that doesn't require much effort to buil…

Ah, yes, the library named Linux.

Linux, even though you may think is a massive project and you may be right in some regards, doesn't require massive amounts of capital, human resources and paid developers, etc. to build it.

Android on the other hand is developed by thousands of engineers and is a much larger project in terms of monetary investment than Linux. Linux was essentially built by a single guy. Android could never have been built by a single person or even a open-source project. It's too massive.

However complex you think Linux is, its just a kernel and doesn't require a conglomerate to build and maintain for billions of users. Android does, and those developers need to get paid for the massive value they provide.

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