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

Android: the return of the Unix wars?

Posted Aug 26, 2010 6:33 UTC (Thu) by kragil (subscriber, #34373)
In reply to: Android: the return of the Unix wars? by davide.del.vento
Parent article: Android: the return of the Unix wars?

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.)

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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?")