Android's Success a Threat To Free Software? 416
Glyn Moody writes "Two years after its launch, Google's Linux-based Android platform is finally making its presence felt in the world of smartphones. Around 20,000 apps have been written for it. Although well behind the iPhone's tally, that's significantly more than just a few months ago. But there's a problem: few of these Android apps are free software. Instead, we seem to be witnessing the birth of a new hybrid stack — open source underneath, and proprietary on top. If, as many believe, mobile phones will become the main computing platform for most of the world, that could be a big problem for the health of the free software ecosystem. So what, if anything, should the community be doing about it?"
Uh...build your own free app? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I'll be the one to say it... (Score:5, Insightful)
> So what, if anything, should the community be doing about it?
Ummm... writing good, foss apps to do the things you need/want to do? Seems obvious.
The obvious answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Gonna go out on a limb here and say "Develop apps for Android."
What an Oddly Backwards Opinion Piece (Score:5, Insightful)
Worse, ifeffortsto enable Android apps to run on distros like Ubuntu succeed, then we may see closed-source software being used on the free software stack there, too. Ironically, Android's success could harm not just open source's chances in the world of mobile phones, but even on the desktop.
Huh, that's a really funny statement. I thought one of the biggest barriers to Linux on the desktop was the fact that we couldn't entice proprietary manufacturers (from device drivers to bulky enterprise solutions) to also release and thoroughly support a Linux distribution of their software. Hell, every other week we're bitching about the sad state of gaming on Linux or sound on Linux and let's just face it: you need to improve that before people will buy Linux for that purpose. And now we're concerned that proprietary will be released on Android? And it might challenge Linux? Good. If it can manage that, good for it. I assure you that if proprietary manufacturers see Android as a viable release alternative to Windows CE, Symbian, etc, that is when you're going to see everyone embrace an open source product.
And really, what's wrong with that? The people who wanted to release their open source software still are but now the people that want to release their closed source software still are and can. And the best part about it is everyone's using an open source stack to support their application.
I don't know about you but if you could replace Windows with Linux on the desktop even though 99% of the apps running on it were proprietary, I would be much more happy with the state of things.
We need both FOSS and proprietary software. Give both of them what they want like options to achieve their goals and then you will have a truly great product that helps the community and humanity as a whole in utilizing computers.
Well, let's see (Score:5, Insightful)
"The community" could come up with a very restrictive license that doesn't allow that sort of thing, which Google et. al. will just not use anyway.
The point of open source and free software is that it's supposed to be better than proprietary. It's supposed to win on merit, not restrictive licensing or "the community" trying to force things.
Re:The obvious answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Or the non obvious answer that many will resort to: Pirate it.
Of course this is just an excuse from someone complaining that software costs money. Software should be free of course! It's not like it costs anything to make high quality software!
Not New: Apple's stack is hybrid too (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not news in any way. Apple's platforms (Mac and iPhone) have been successful for precisely the same reason. They exploit open source for the infrastructure (OS and developer tool chain) and layer proprietary applications on top for profitability.
This is silly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The obvious answer (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that pirating may/will happen... But, I tend to think that "The Open Source Community" would frown on those shenanigans.
Nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
Could be nice that all Android apps to be open source, but buiding a mixed ecosystem around it brings more people to the party anyway.
What could be healthier? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sick of those fundamentalists. What could be healthier than an open source platform without vendor lock-in, that anybody can use to generate some income. I love what has been produced in the spirit of open source and nobody won't take this away. But the everything must be free mentality is a bigger threat than people making money by selling software in binary form for a living. Good software means months of work and pizza and coffee need to be paid for. And experience has shown that at max 0.5% of people pay for something that they can get for free easily and legally.
Re:Okay, I'll be the one to say it... (Score:1, Insightful)
There really hasn't been a good one to copy from yet, though.
Re:Okay, I'll be the one to say it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. There's nothing to see here. There is tremendous drive right now for developers with an interest in making money to develop apps for Android. The drive is there because the "promise" of riches is there. But, just like the desktop computing environment before, the commercial developers will be followed by OSS developers who just have an itch to scratch that no existing app handles, or they realize people are charging money for an app that is essentially twenty lines of code and they say, "really? they charge money for that? How ridiculous!" and write a better version under a FLOSS license. I have added a crapload of apps to my droid, all free as in beer and some free as in speech. It's cool to realize some of the games I play on my phone I could contribute patches to if I so desired.
One of the reasons I chose this phone is because I use the Android SDK and have written a few (VERY simple) apps and know if there's something I want bad enough, I can develop it myself and I don't have to root (or "jailbreak") my phone (voiding warranties) or get Google or Apple's approval to install it.
No it doesn't (Score:3, Insightful)
Commercial software is what leads to open source software in many cases. When someone makes an app that you have to pay for, someone else will write one that you don't. MySQL was not first, it was the answer for those that couldn't afford Oracle, DB2, etc.
Most open source programmers enjoy programming. One will see a need and fill it with their own project. The more people that want that need filled, the more projects and higher quality projects we will see.
Re:Okay, I'll be the one to say it... (Score:5, Insightful)
No enlightened self-interest in fart apps (Score:3, Insightful)
And nothing of value was lost?
If I'm a developer trying to write a major app - say a wordprocessor or an operating system - I have a huge job ahead of me and hence, a good incentive to recruit the help of the FOSS community by opening my code. Likewise, the community has a stronmg incentive to help.
A lot of "Apps", however, tend to be fairly simple, verging on the trivial, single-purpose applications, and a good one might owe more to being a cool idea rather than a clever and intricate bit of coding. There's less incentive to share (and less incentive for the community to help).
Of course, the community still gains from the increasing popularity of the underlying, open source OS and the "big tools" (like WebKit).
I suspect that open source will continue to be better at systems & infrastructure stuff (where the target audience is programmers or other nerds) than user-facing apps. Nerds aren't good at writing software for non-nerds.
Re:flawed premise (Score:4, Insightful)
They're far too small, limited, have terrible human-input interfaces, too small screens and puny batteries.
Small: Asset
Limited: The new OMAP chips are pretty ballsy, and can do HD video output... and are coming to a phone near you
Terrible human-input: Bluetooth, baby. Bluetooth.
Too-Small screens: HDMI would fit on a phone just fine.
Puny batteries: You plug it in when you're doing heavy lifting.
I suspect that cellphones WILL become the dominant computing device for a time. Not least because it's much cheaper than buying a PC and a cellphone, and cellphones are fairly ubiquitous already... and becoming more literally so.
We've gone long enough without real progress... (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, as much as all this Cathedral and Bazaar/Chaos crap sounds good in some righteous fight against the man, I've been using and helping to build Linux since 1995 and what we have sorely needed is some form of direction and vision. OS X has made such massive leaps and bounds with a relatively small number of developers because they have a solid vision and goal steering their efforts. We just flail about and continually eschew any sort of cohesive goal. It shows. Linus doesn't want to take control and everyone wants to claim that it is not needed, but amazingly the Kernel itself requires this type of management and oversight... and it is always the most progressive part of the whole. But what good is the best kernel without a supporting structure? It's time to either take the bull by the horns, or step back and allow a company like Google or Canonical to do it. Canonical and Ubuntu have floundered and have not come out as that entity even with the success in interest they garnered (like Red Hat before it), so it's time for another to try. I could care less who finally does it, just get it done!
Re:Uh...build your own free app? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Uh...build your own free app? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly! How in the world can the platform be at fault just because open source developers have not jumped onto it yet.
This posting is just trying to create a controversy out of thin air. Must be a slow news day.
Re:Not New: Apple's stack is hybrid too (Score:5, Insightful)
In a sense Apple's contributions to open-source projects are a way to protect their investment. Even under a BSD license, not contributing back upstream is equivalent to forking the project. If they did that they'd have to spend a lot of time and money merging upstream changes down the line, instead of having upstream do the work for free.
Also I'd imagine the sort of engineer who would be able to contribute good code to something like LLVM is not too common, and (s)he would have a strong sense of wanting to give back. To keep people like that, a company needs to make them feel enfranchised.
Re:Maemo (Score:4, Insightful)
I did (vote with my wallet). Maemo lost. Google managed to get a provider that actually has coverage where I live to sell an android device. Maemo? Not so much. When ideology collides with the real world, sometimes the real world wins. I hope this changes in the future, because I didn't have any preexisting bias for android, but I can use my android phone NOW, rather than wait for the nebulous future when the planets line up just right to make devices available that run software which fits my ideology perfectly. OTOH, I can't say I have much to complain about with android so far. I've been able to run only Free (as in speech) apps to get the functionality I desire, and I can write my own using the SDK that's available. Seems like a fine situation to me.
There would be no FOSS without the fundamentalists (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't kid yourself. Without Stallman and his supporters there would have been no FSF, no GCC to compile free programmes, no utilities to facilitate the creation of the Linux Kernel and you would be paying top dollar for your Microsoft OS and applications. Before the Linux Kernel came along if you wanted in to UNIX you had to fork out serious money. Stallman, the FSF and Linux (that's why he wants you to call it GNU/Linux see, so that you get to know the history) changed all that in a fundamental way.
So sure, go ahead and say you are sick of those fundamentalists. What have you done to make it all happen? Nothing.
And incidentally, nobody is saying you shouldn't charge for software you write.
Re:Uh...build your own free app? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, and big part of the reason theres so many apps already is because innovation is greatly driven by money and many people want to jump in.
Actually if Android was limiting itself to only open source, free software I don't think there would be so many apps made. This is especially true because they usually lack in UI and graphical terms, where the first one is really important in mobile apps.
Whole Android would be a lot less open if it didn't let commercial software on it. Even Windows Mobile is more open because you can install any app on it, unlike with iPhone (no, jailbreaking doesn't count)
Re:Okay, I'll be the one to say it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless of course you want to do something that Google/T-Mobile don't want you to do, then you DO have to root it.
Re:The obvious answer (Score:3, Insightful)
And thus they are actually just destroying open source community by using the closed source apps and helping to spread their use to companies and other users.
Only because it's not really about open source mentality, it's about wanting it for free.
Re:What could be healthier? (Score:4, Insightful)
I am an open source advocate. However, with that said, I disagree with the OP. I firmly believe that open source and proprietary applications can and should co-exist. What's happening on the Android market is what I believe to be the next natural progression of our society. The base, the core, the building blocks are all open source. They enable anyone to compete on a fair playing field. Who cares that the majority of applications developed on top are not open? So long as they play nice (open communications, standards compliant), what harm is it doing?
Most people don't need 95% of the capabilities of Photoshop... That's why open source alternatives do exist (tho most suck). Sure, they may TRY to compete, but most fall well short of hitting the mark. But they can help to fill in that 95% gap, so that the only people who wind up paying for Photoshop are the people who actually need what it provides. That's the true power of open source. Not to fill every niche role, but to take care of the 95%. There's good $$$ in the 5%, which is why companies like Adobe exist. The world is a big place, and I firmly believe that there's both room and a need for both open source and proprietary applications...
That's just my $0.02...
I do see a problem here, but it isn't Android (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is the hardware, and the carriers.
With PCs, there is nothing(aside from certain driver issues) stopping you from running whatever you want on your hardware. And, with a bit of informed shopping, you can usually get a desirable hardware configuration without too much trouble. With phones, though, the manufacturers and carriers have their hooks into the process much more deeply. While the implementations have often been pretty weak, allowing a variety of hacks, proprietary components explicitly targeted against the user are ubiquitous(SIM locks, anyone?) and even the FOSS components are apt to be more or less tivoized on most handsets that you can actually buy.
I'd say that smartphone software is shaping up to be freer than PC software; but smartphone hardware is far closer to dystopian trusted computing/Palladium/NGSCB stuff than PC hardware is.
Re:Okay, I'll be the one to say it... (Score:3, Insightful)
The N900 is very expensive. Android phones may not be very cheap yet, but it's improving.
Maemo may be nice, but it doesn't have a dozen Asian ODMs making phones that run it.
Re:There would be no FOSS without the fundamentali (Score:4, Insightful)
I strongly disagree. Open Source has mainly been brought forward by pragmatists as Linus with a sense to attract high level software industry supporters. The fundamentalists were, the last time I checked, still working on GNU/Hurd. ;)
Re:Okay, I'll be the one to say it... (Score:1, Insightful)
> > So what, if anything, should the community be doing about it?
>Ummm... writing good, foss apps to do the things you need/want to do? Seems obvious
If they haven't been doing it up to now, what makes you think they are going to do it starting now?
FOSS is kind of funny. It's been dead of it's own incompetence for at least a decade, but nobody involved seemed to have noticed. They're still fighting the "browser wars", for goodness sake.
The primary reason FOSS will always lose is because most of the people want to work on the "cool" or fun stuff... yet nobody wants to do the hard and boring stuff. That's why Firefox STILL has the same memory leaks it's always had- because it's so much easier to make a newer funner plugin (or write another text editor) than it is to hunt down bugs.
Another issue is focus. Instead of putting time and resources into Teh Lunix on mobile platforms, they instead squandering their time trying to beat Windows.
You go, Lunix! You just may end up making the very bestest buggy whip out there.
Re:Uh...build your own free app? (Score:5, Insightful)
So after all these years of fretting that users of free OSes are unwilling to support worthwhile commercial development for them (e.g. ports of popular apps and games to Linux, to free people from the tyranny of Windows and Mac OS), we now have a Linux-based platform that is attracting commercial development and that's a problem?
Re:Not New: Apple's stack is hybrid too (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, this is a point that I've made in the past. The BSD license is a better tool for encouraging corporate participation. The BSD license says 'you can keep your changes to this private if you want, but in the end it will end up costing you more if you do.' The GPL, on the other hand, says 'if you don't give everything back then we will attack you with lawyers.' The corporate reaction to the first is usually to evaluate the cost and benefit of working with the community and (usually, but not always) decide it's in their interest. The corporate response to the second is to look for loopholes in the license (of which there are a great many).
Also I'd imagine the sort of engineer who would be able to contribute good code to something like LLVM is not too common
Actually, you might be surprised. LLVM is a pretty clean code base, by C++ standards. The time between when I first looked at the code, and when I got my first patch accepted was about a week. I wrote the initial implementation of code generation for Objective-C in clang, and now have commit access to LLVM (which I haven't used for a while; I've been working on other things). It's a very easy project to get involved with.
Apple keeps LLVM open source because they are not in the compilers business. They don't make money from selling compilers, but they do make money from the fact that high quality compilers exist for their system. It is in their best interests to release their changes to LLVM in a way that encourages other people to improve on them, and the benefit from the likes of Adobe, Cray, Sun and nVidia contributing changes. You get better commitment from people when they choose to be involved; no one has to give back to LLVM, but the ones that do all do so because they know that it benefits them. I put in a bit of effort and now have a working compiler for Objective-C, supporting all of the recent Apple extensions, that works on non-Apple platforms. Apple got some bug fixes and improvements to parts of the codebase that they use as a result of my work. Both of us benefit (although, proportional to investment, I benefit a lot more).
I actually spent more time trying to understand the GCC Objective-C code before I looked at clang than I did looking at LLVM, and I still haven't managed to make any significant changes to GCC. I laugh whenever I go to the FSF's page about great successes of the GPL and find that they are still claiming that forcing NeXT to release the Objective-C front end for GCC was a win for Free Software; the code is a completely unmaintainable mess. Rewriting it completely in clang was less effort than understanding it.
Re:The obvious answer (Score:3, Insightful)
-1 Factually Incorrect would just call for "I don't agree with the poster, but instead of answering and correcting I just mod him down without telling what is incorrect" mods
Re:Okay, I'll be the one to say it... (Score:2, Insightful)
n900 (Score:3, Insightful)
Or support the N900 instead of the Android. It's not a totally open stack, but it's much more so than Android, and the apps also tend to be direct ports of Linux OSS. And the whole thing is less locked down to begin with.
I'm writing from one.... the "app stores" are just debian repositories, it's really an open platform... and the GUI is awesome...
Re:The obvious answer (Score:3, Insightful)
What we really need is a -1 Factually Incorrect.
I second that motion.