Android: the return of the Unix wars? [LWN.net]

Android: the return of the Unix wars?

Posted Aug 24, 2010 17:37 UTC (Tue) by davide.del.vento (guest, #59196)
In reply to: Android: the return of the Unix wars? by Trelane
Parent article: Android: the return of the Unix wars?

I heartily agree with you that GPL (v3!!!!) would have been much better for customers and handset manufacturer alike.

Unfortunately, I think that if Google had GPL'ed Android, it wouldn't have had the success it had, because handsets manufacturer and especially carriers would not have embraced it so broadly.

On the Google side, the company is of course interested in the profits, not directly freedom or "progress". Their bottom line is: on the iPhones, they have to share search revenues with Apple, on Android they don't. Google has has already claimed (can't find the link now, but I could dig) that the cost of developing and maintaining Android has already been paid by the much higher revenue they get from searches (compared with what they would have get from iPhones).

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Android: the return of the Unix wars?

Posted Aug 26, 2010 6:33 UTC (Thu) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]

Food for thought:

Assume Meego fails and IOS becomes the 5% Apple high profit niche and WP7 will be a success like Kin/WinMo and Symbian/Blackberry continue to decline (Not really unlikely once all phones become smartphones)

Then Android will have such a big market share that Google could start relicensing Androids plumbing LGPL, that would force vendors to release changes to the plumbing layer and reduce Googles cost of maintaining the platform and likely accelerate development without too much fallout.
And it would hinder China Mobile to profit from Android without Google getting anything (An Android fork without any Google is becoming the most used handset OS in China.)

Android: the return of the Unix wars?

Posted Aug 26, 2010 13:02 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

The crapware issue and the downmarket Android issue are connected. The sooner that crapware brings in enough additional revenue per subscriber to justify it, the sooner that the US carriers start offering Android phones as the default "free" phone with contract. ("Make a phone call? Is it the big Blockbuster button, the big Mafia Wars button, or the big Yelp button?")