root almighty

[Rui Miguel Silva Seabra]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 07:23:38AM -0700, Gothnet wrote:
> Max Suraev wrote:
> > 
> > В Втр, 19/05/2009 в 09:48 +0200, Radek Polak пишет:
> >> Maybe take a look at Android?
> > 
> > That's not an option for me because I plan to limit myself to free (as
> > in freedom) distributions only. If I wanted some proprietary staff on my
> > phone I would just buy some sort of chineese iphone :-)
> > 
> > Thanks for suggestion anyway,
> > Max.
> > 
> > 
> 
> What's proprietary about android?

The DRM locking you out of applying changes to phones. The excuse of "oh, its the
phone maker/operator that does it" is a mere smoke screen.

And no, an unbricked android phone does not count as Free Software since you're
possibly breaking the law (in the US thanks to the DMCA, and in EU thanks to the
EUCD).

> You think the android folks are throwing hacked binaries around the place?

No, just gladly providing the tools to remove our freedoms.

> Android is under the APL2, which has even less restriction than the GPL,

Only on a superficial level can that be true. It has less restrictions than the
GPL because the later tries to make sure everyone has all the essencial freedoms.

APL2 (and similar licenses) mean that somewhere along the line YOU may not have
a Free Software phone on your hands, just another proprietary piece of crap.

> it. Check out koolu for their android source git, though the mainline source
> is available directly from google.

Yes, the OpenMoko is the first Free Software example of Android (and it's the
worst out there for making calls on the FreeRunner, according to the comments
I've seen).

Rui

-- 
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