221–230 of 350 posts
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Thanks for GrapheneOS, and shame on Google. > They'll sell far fewer Pixels because of these overall changes. They don't even sell Pixels internationally. Can't tell you how glad I am you're moving to Motorola. I'm really looking forward to having a Motorola GrapheneOS phone!!
Are you sure, I got one and I'm in Central Europe.
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> They need to do it in a reasonable amount of time. If they did that for years within hours and if we look at the tools available today, I would expect that "reasonable" equates to how they provided it prior: fast.
They did it for many years with 0 delay because they pushed the tags to AOSP. It was moved to Google Drive with a Google Forms setup to request access with manual fulfillment of the request. It was deliberately done to make it into a hassle. The delays are by design through making it a manual system regardless of how much of a delay was intended as part of this change. They could be automatically handling the request…
“In violation of GPL” is a stretch. Can’t imagine Google is making the process of obtaining source code easier on themselves though. Android has always been more source-open than “open source”. The vast majority of community contributions that make it into the codebase are security fixes and small bug fixes. Everything else is essentially all the work of Google and (to some extent) Samsung.
I hate Google as much as the next person, and the only way with those companies would be to fine them heavily, quickly and systematically.
But it is important that we are clear about what Google does bad and what it does well. And I believe that understanding what "open source" means is important when one wants to talk about a violation of an open source licence.
Open source does not mean that they take contributions. Many firmwares used by Android are not open source, but AOSP is open source. It is licenced under a permissive licence (Apache 2, I think for everything), which makes it open source, period.
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It's paying a bill in pennies.
> It's paying a bill in pennies. This is actually a problem that is solved in German law: § 3 Münzgesetz (MünzG), Absatz 1 [§ 3 Coins Act, article 1] "§ 3 Annahme- und Umtauschpflicht (1) Niemand ist verpflichtet, deutsche Euro-Gedenkmünzen im Betrag von mehr als 200 Euro bei einer einzelnen Zahlung anzunehmen. Erfolgt eine einzelne Zahlung sowohl in Euro-Münzen als auch in deutschen Euro-Gedenkmünzen, ist niemand ve…
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Man, all of these little steps Google is taking to take the control away from the users, not to take over the world or anything else, but to force on you more accurate advertisements. What are we even doing?
Any inconveniences with Linux phones are less annoying to me than what Google is doing to AOSP. My next phone will run postmarketOS.
The thing is, AOSP is open source. Just like Linux is not controlled by one of the TooBigTechs, I could imagine a fork of AOSP becoming a viable alternative without depending on Google anymore.
And supporting alternative Android OSes (like GrapheneOS and LineageOS) is one way to support that vision.
Linux on Mobile is nice, but unfortunately I think it's an uphill battle because of all the proprietary firmwares?
Is it about Android code? Could this be related to the upcoming change (close) of the apk side-loading?
The era of big tech cooperation around free software is obviously over. Those kind of moves are petty but there are worst tricks they can pull unfortunately. It seems Grapheneos is the rare actor willing to put up a fight nowadays, and their "partnership" with Motorola seems to be a first step. They need to ensure a hardware platform. My guess is at some point they will have to fork AOSP, just because Google will tak…
I am still sad that Huawei didn't go this way, I thought they would with HarmonyOS.
I wonder if it could happen at some point that an alternative Android becomes so big that OEMs start supporting it. It feels like it may be interesting for the big Android manufacturers to support something like GrapheneOS?
I wonder: for those Motorola phones that will come with GrapheneOS, won't that make it cheaper for Motorola because they won't have to pay the Google licence (because those GrapheneOS-Motorola phone won't be Google-certified)?
I really don't understand the thought process here. Judging by public statements, Google is one of the 3 big western AI companies. Surely they should be rolling in cash and working hard towards AGI. And yet, for whatever reason, they can't help themselves from further restricting user freedoms on Android. Why? I don't want to be conspiratorial, but surely it's not money, right? It has to be control. Someone high up a…
On top of that, I believe that the sum of the actions of well-meaning people doesn't always result in something good. In big companies like Google, I'm sure that many people are taking decisions that they think are well-meaning, but the result is that Google is a toxic entity.
In other words, because Google sucks doesn't mean that all Google employees are evil. Many of them just take their high salary and try to do well, conveniently ignoring that they contribute to a toxic entity.
But why? What can be the internal justification? What do they think they win by doing this?
Difficult to say at the moment, but there might be some speculation as to why. One might be that they dont security patches reverse engineered and vulnerabilities to come out faster (some critical and high severity fixes in GPU drivers/bootloaders were often delayed), and this decision was done long before LLMs were considered powerful/useful for vulnerability research. Second reason might be simply "Control of the a…