251–260 of 467 posts
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They won't because they literally control the mobile market by having Android open source.
Now that their market is established, I don't think open-source is a requirement anymore. They would of course share with hardware vendors strategically.
If they would close-source it, the community for sure will pick up the pieces.
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It is. 17 U.S. Code § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems
Well actually, it isn’t for individuals and certain groups, technically. Rooting/jailbreaking have had exemptions for many years now, on a three year basis which has seemingly been continually renewed, by the Librarian of Congress. Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies (2024) https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24... https://www…
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Has no one mentioned not using a smartphone as an option?
How do you run WhatsApp or Signal without a smartphone? Pretty hard. If your answer is "don't use them", then you're not living in a country where the vast majority of communications are done on WhatsApp or Signal, good for you I guess.
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Why, of all parts on a phone, would you expect the battery to be the one that's already good enough that it should never need to be upgraded? "Battery capacity" is like the one thing phone manufacturers still try to improve.
The interfaces and the external dimensions can remain the same even as the internals change though, right? And you can have more or fewer cells. The cells don't have to be cylinders, either. They can be flat.
Besides it's pretty easy to get custom battery pouches made.
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The interfaces and the external dimensions can remain the same even as the internals change though, right? And you can have more or fewer cells. The cells don't have to be cylinders, either. They can be flat.
They are usually shaped to fit in exactly the space available to maximize capacity. Standard cell sizes wastes space. Besides it's pretty easy to get custom battery pouches made.
For older phones, the batteries we buy are likely also old stock left over if we can find some in stock anyway, right?
Why was it that in the early PC days, IBM was unable to keep a lid on 'IBM compatible', allowing for the PC interoperability explosion, yet today, almost every phone has closed drivers, closed and locked bootloaders, and almost complete corporate control over our devices? Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice?
Nobody gave you the actual answer. IBM was under an antitrust decree and had to openly license their technology for a nominal fee. (Supposedly about $5/PC.) So yes, they were in a hurry and used generic parts, but they still had tons of patents on it. When they got out from under this, they came up with Microchannel.
As a LineageOS user, I'd be interested in the disparity between GrapheneOS and LineageOS.
They have different goals: GrapheneOS wants to make a FOSS Android with the security model that makes it hard for any bad party to break into the phone. LineageOS wants to make a FOSS Android that respects user's privacy first and foremost - it implements security as best as it can but the level of security protections differs on different supported devices. Good news is that if you have a boot passphrase, it's secur…
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The same can be said about the Linux codebase. Tomorrow Linus could private his branch and stop supporting public releases. If AOSP goes closed source then people can fork it and continue to maintain it.
Linux doesn’t really rely on Linus for coding anymore…