Toward a freer Android [LWN.net]

Toward a freer Android

Posted Oct 6, 2009 20:31 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Toward a freer Android by xav
Parent article: Toward a freer Android

Well Maemo 5 and Moblin are going to be very similar. The major difference is that Maemo is promoted for ARM handsets and Moblin platform is for Atom.

Since both projects are belong to part of the Gnome Mobile initiative it would be nice when we will be able to just run Gnome Debian or Fedora on a handset without loss of functionality.

It should be possible to do that now with a large loss of ease-of-use, but retain most of the phone functionality and such things.

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Toward a freer Android

Posted Oct 7, 2009 8:48 UTC (Wed) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link]

Maemo will use Qt, so it won't be that GNOME-y.
Moblin, on the other hand, looks to be closer to the GNOME Mobile platform.

I also long for the day we can get rid of proprietary low-level components without any loss of functionality.

Toward a freer Android

Posted Oct 7, 2009 15:05 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

_will_ is the word here.

The nice thing about the N900 is that its pretty much open phone. There are
proprietary bits, to be sure, but it is going to take much less effort to
deal with those then what it will take with the average android phone. The
most important bits, except the bootloader (I presume) and the GSM stuff
are going to be open source. The other things should be easy to take care
of.

And I am not saying "android" as a OS.. I mean a practical phone that you
purchase. Most of those are going to be locked down quite a bit were the
average user is going to have to jump through big hoops just to get
software installed on it from sources other then the approved app store.
And they will have every number of proprietary bits that the N900 has, and
more.

If somebody releases a phone to the public that is Android and is open then
I would love to hear about it... I am not looking forward to spending the
600 dollars to get my hands on a N900, but like Google was trying to
explain to people about the first android phones is that while the OS
platform is theirs the phones are not and they have little control over the
actual vendor.

Toward a freer Android

Posted Oct 7, 2009 15:09 UTC (Wed) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link]

AFAIK even the bootloader should be open.

And for the $600 ... consider yourself lucky. Where I live it costs 650, which is more like $1000 nowadays.

Toward a freer Android

Posted Oct 8, 2009 3:50 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

Bear in mind that there's very little interesting code in the bootloader. While nolo during Nokia 770 and N8x0 times was quite bloated and contained a great deal of setup code, this has almost entirely been repatriated to the kernel for the N900.