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Android without the mothership

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Re: Android without the mothership

#141

Post by glogla »

pessimizer wrote: post #105
diafygi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm, that's exactly what Firefox OS is. It's the Firefox engine (gecko) sitting on top of the linux kernel.

What unabriged means is that you don't need an entire reimplementation of the underlying OS to make calls, all you need is an Linux app that makes calls. The purpose of reimplementation is generally to screw consumers. There's nothing special about a phone that requires you to put everything into a VM. I don't know why firefox is doing it. I did order a development phone, though, because if it takes off, I want a sha…

> I don't know why firefox is doing it.

To make it more accessible. Way more people can make web page than make QT or GTK GUI. Way more people can do Javascript than can program in C or C++.

That means, that everyone is stuck with html and js, but I think it's worth it.

Re: Android without the mothership

#142

Post by jmhain »

unabridged wrote: post #52

Android is a lost cause, all the man power being donated to the project is just going to line google's pockets and lock us further into closed hardware and barely opensource phones. The only future is a real linux phone, debian or ubuntu mobile, where one day there will be effortless desktop/tablet/mobile unified development. Why push for developers to waste time porting between c++ and java?

I don't necessarily agree with everything you said, but I also greatly desire a "real" Linux phone, particularly built on the GNOME platform. I have dozens of reasons why I think it could be groundbreaking, but I'm well aware that developing such a platform has an almost-zero chance of succeeding. Nevertheless, if I can get enough people to agree and get involved, I would dedicate myself to this task.

Re: Android without the mothership

#144

Post by scholia »

ufmace wrote: post #131
ksk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google has open sourced a fully featured mobile operating system, Its interesting how Google forces handset makers to ship Google's proprietary software if they wish to use the Android "brand". However, they don't care if handset makers ship device driver code thus crippling the ability of anyone wishing to create a fully working AOSP ROM. I suppose in Googles eyes, Android = more data for Google to mine/sell/profit…

I think, at this point, a big part of it is just maintaining control of the platform. It seems like a selfish goal, but if they didn't, then some other company just might take it over by forking it, making their own proprietary version, and making that version more popular. It arguably came close to happening already with Samsung's market dominance, and Amazon's non-google Kindle Android. With so much money wrapped u…

The problem with Google controlling it is that it already has a monopoly market share of web advertising and web search, and much the biggest web-based tracking system. Add email, maps, cloud-hosting and other services and it has unprecedented power.

As well as a monopoly market share of smartphones, it's now expanding into other areas such as cars, TVs (again), robots, internet delivery and so on.

Monopoly market shares are fairly common in technology, but it becomes dangerous when any single company gets to control too many of them....

Re: Android without the mothership

#145

Post by ssprang »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #134
ssprang wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally, why shouldn't people have a right to privacy? Are you saying that there isn't any information about yourself that you'd want to keep private? Why are the details of my life anybody's business but my own? > I don't see many people claiming their right to lie, their right to fraud, their right to steal. What makes privacy so different? Well, for one thing, privacy is neither immoral nor illegal. How are…

> Fundamentally, why shouldn't people have a right to privacy? Are you saying that there isn't any information about yourself that you'd want to keep private? Why are the details of my life anybody's business but my own? You don't own yourself. Everything you do is an interaction with the world (including your own body and mind), which belongs to everyone equally. Whether or not the imperfect beings we are want to hi…

> You don't own yourself. Everything you do is an interaction with the world (including your own body and mind), which belongs to everyone equally.

This is an extreme view. How can we even begin to talk about desires and rights under this assumption? If I don't own myself, how can I own anything? We have to throw out the idea of property, the concept of theft and so on. Is murder even wrong in this context?

Re: Android without the mothership

#146

Post by kodablah »

mike_hearn wrote: post #74
grey-area wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be really nice would be seeing a language-agnostic device. Based on linux, with the same APIs available to everyone, so that as on desktop linux, a thousand languages can bloom, and everyone can use the development language of their choice (including yet to be invented languages). GUI bindings would be the issue here of course, but it is not insurmountable. It's a shame that the software landscape is so do…

Great idea! It would make sense to define a high level yet minimalist type system, a large standard library, and a CPU independent bytecode format that many languages and compilers could target. They could then add to that basic type system as they wished whilst still retaining interoperability. We could call the infrastructure that makes this possible ... a virtual machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_l…

Scala has dropped Android support and I doubt others are gonna try and maintain it as new JVM instructions come out that we all want to take advantage of but Android will not support.

Re: Android without the mothership

#147

Post by miguelrochefort »

ssprang wrote: post #145
miguelrochefort wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fundamentally, why shouldn't people have a right to privacy? Are you saying that there isn't any information about yourself that you'd want to keep private? Why are the details of my life anybody's business but my own? You don't own yourself. Everything you do is an interaction with the world (including your own body and mind), which belongs to everyone equally. Whether or not the imperfect beings we are want to hi…

> You don't own yourself. Everything you do is an interaction with the world (including your own body and mind), which belongs to everyone equally. This is an extreme view. How can we even begin to talk about desires and rights under this assumption? If I don't own myself, how can I own anything? We have to throw out the idea of property, the concept of theft and so on. Is murder even wrong in this context?

> We have to throw out the idea of property, the concept of theft and so on.

Of course.

> Is murder even wrong in this context?

Murder is not wrong. Murder is just an action that reflects a decision. Whether it's good or not depends entirely on whether the outcome is optimal or not. Murder is not qualitatively different from, say, breaking a window. The only difference is one of quantity and scale. Generally, much more time and energy is invested in a living person than in the creation and installation of a window.

Re: Android without the mothership

#148

Post by josephlord »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #135
josephlord wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are carrying a Google phone and using the Google systems you are giving them access to where you are going, where you have been, who you have met, who you know. All these can be intimate personal details at times. They may provide information about health, sexual partners and activity. They can also reveal journalistic sources and high level company meetings that might give rise to insider trading. Is this all…

> If you are carrying a Google phone and using the Google systems you are giving them access to where you are going, where you have been, who you have met, who you know. That's great! Profit while it's still free. We'll soon have to pay to get businesses to track us. > All these can be intimate personal details at times. They may provide information about health, sexual partners and activity. They can also reveal jou…

I'm starting to think you are trolling me.

In case anyone is taking your position seriously Google don't necessarily share the information about you with you. Secondly in twenty years time when someone has obtained high office Google will still have the records of them visiting prostitutes/gay bars/anti-gay marriage events (whatever is disapproved of in 2035) and Google[0] or a disreputable employee[1] will blackmail them.

[0] Google 2014 obviously wouldn't do something so disreputable but give it 20 years of falling marketshare, decreasing quality of management and desperation and who knows where it might be.

[1] Likewise todays controls on data may be tight but who knows when they might be dismantled when they get in the way of profit.

Re: Android without the mothership

#149

Post by sp332 »

DCKing wrote: post #119
ksk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AOSP is still open source for that reason, presumably. Yeah..AOSP "works".. if you happen to have the driver binary blobs (which are not open source), which only work for some android builds on a handful of devices which are blessed by google. Open source indeed. Oh and those binary blobs.. those are LICENSED. You are not allowed to make an android build and distribute it, if it contains those blobs. And without th…

> Google have taken the Open Source ideology and bastardized it to fit their commercial needs. Ah you're one of the people that thinks open source also comes with a mandatory ideology. That it's not good enough if source is released for everyone unless there are also other strings attached. We can leave this in disagreement then. > Feel free to explain this clause in Google's privacy policy. You have to redefine a lo…

It's not an ideological problem, it's a practical one. If most of the Android software running out there depends on proprietary blobs, then I lose many of the benefits of open-source software including running it on my own hardware.

Re: Android without the mothership

#150

Post by sp332 »

pessimizer wrote: post #105
diafygi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm, that's exactly what Firefox OS is. It's the Firefox engine (gecko) sitting on top of the linux kernel.

What unabriged means is that you don't need an entire reimplementation of the underlying OS to make calls, all you need is an Linux app that makes calls. The purpose of reimplementation is generally to screw consumers. There's nothing special about a phone that requires you to put everything into a VM. I don't know why firefox is doing it. I did order a development phone, though, because if it takes off, I want a sha…

It's really frustrating to try to take a photo from a web app. Before Firefox OS, Android didn't even let web pages interact with the phone's dialer, which is like the #1 feature of a phone. Firefox OS is a platform for developing web APIs that can interact with all the phone parts. After standardization, these APIs could be implemented by any phone's web browser, like Chrome on Android or even IE on Windows Phone.
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