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Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

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Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#11

Post by camus2 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #2

Good. I do not want open source to prevail. I want free software. On a less provocative note, I don't understand the argument about web apps. There's tons of FOSS web application frameworks and widget toolkits, and the web is slowly conquering the desktop, for better or for worse. Has it not dominated?

> Has it not dominated?

Yes in term of lob/100 page "fairly large" form apps, No in term of native apps that actually do something.

When people show me a Photoshop,Indesign,Final Cut or a 3ds Max (fully featured,not just 3 edit tools hanging around) built in HTML,that work OFFLINE,that can open gigabytes of datas, with great performances on low end hardware, i will agree ( Which my old macbook does with no problem with these native apps).

Let's just take the many text editors built in HTML/JS , try to open a 10/15 mb text file(an apache log file for instance),execute a search/replace with it and see how it performs.

HTML everything is a promise, an idea that can be only fulfilled if the browser engines(not just the javascript engines,the DOM is not javascript) are as fast as native os(and hardware becomes faster too). That's not the case today. So people can say javascript 'is fast' all they want,that's not the bottleneck anymore.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#12

Post by tluyben2 »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #10
tluyben2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the reasons everyone keeps mentioning here: the top apps people want for Android are not open source.

It's not so much that, it's that a rather large percentage of the apps people want for Android won't run on AOSP. They require Android + Google Services, which are all closed.

I think that's what I meant or maybe you mean something else; what kind of thing are you talking about? People want the Google services apps but which apps people want which are not Google apps require Google services?

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#13

Post by dave1010uk »

spindritf wrote: post #5

Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android. I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

What application did you use to post that comment? Is it Open Source?

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#16

Post by dippyskoodlez »

tluyben2 wrote: post #8
mindcrime wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future of computing is on apps coded against one of two proprietary platforms: Apple's or Google's That's an overly narrow view that seems to equate all of "computing" with "smart phones / tablets". I don't think that's a very accurate view. A lot of what happens on computers has nothing to with either.

It's quite accurate for consumer computing though. I just don't see that Android is closed source in that way; the implementation you program against to make the software people use on their tablets/phones is Open Source. Same with ChromeOS. Not so with Windows or iOS or OS X.

You do get a lot of the standard opensource tools with OS X, though. Since Apple uses Obj-C they own the frameworks but if you follow their development models, everything is cake.

It's not like Google isn't providing closed source api's too, though.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#17

Post by saosebastiao »

Android is such a miserable experience that it has made me turn in my phone for the first closed-source computing device I have owned in 9 years. The latency on everything is at least 200-300ms, which makes typing consistently difficult (as if the moronic autocorrect didn't make it impossible anyways). The battery consumption is terrible (I have never been able to go more than 12 hours without a charge, and after a year, it is more like 3-4 hours). The apps are buggy as hell, and crash all the time. And they are always riddled with bloatware and carrier apps that are not removable. If you don't like giving away ever-expanding permissions to random apps, you either get pinged about it daily as everything tries to auto-upgrade, or you have to delete the app (which, like I said before, isn't always possible).

I hate apple, and I hate that I'm giving them my money, but just the latency issue alone is enough for me to give up on Android.

Help me Mozilla, you are my only hope.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#18

Post by mikelat »

tluyben2 wrote: post #7
spindritf wrote: post #5

Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android. I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

For all the reasons everyone keeps mentioning here: the top apps people want for Android are not open source.

If this is an important issue then are there not people working on open source implementations of some of the apps? Maybe we can see a "distribution" of android that comes with f-droid and a host of other open source software preinstalled.

Re: Open source has won the battle but is losing the war

#20

Post by dmxt »

saosebastiao wrote: post #17

Android is such a miserable experience that it has made me turn in my phone for the first closed-source computing device I have owned in 9 years. The latency on everything is at least 200-300ms, which makes typing consistently difficult (as if the moronic autocorrect didn't make it impossible anyways). The battery consumption is terrible (I have never been able to go more than 12 hours without a charge, and after a y…

Seriously? Are you implying that there's one and only one type of Android device?

My Galaxy S4 is rooted and flashed to semi-vanilla Android with no extra application bundled. I charge my phone every 3 days. Using my preference of keyboard software makes typing much faster and easier and my keyboard is more efficient than keyboard on iOS 7.

Regarding your latency issue, this is probably the hardware fault. It's not a "known" issue with Android.

However what you were saying might make sense if the last time you tried Android device was 4+ years ago, in this case, Android has really improved greatly lately.

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