It's simple, really.

It's simple, really.

Posted Mar 31, 2011 17:09 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: It seems so. by tajyrink
Parent article: How Amazon could loosen Google's iron grip on Android (ars technica)

If a project is not widely regarded as a market share success, it's a historical curiosity and not a useful piece of software?

It depends on the ability to use it with contemporary hardware. If you can only buy the required hardware in the second-hand shops then it's historical curiosity.

I believe there are a lot of happy Rockbox users around, and all of them are a reason for Rockbox to be a huge success.

Well, Rockbox was a significant success - but that time has gone. Today it's very hard to buy a compatible hardware and few users bother. As userbase dwingles developerbase dwingles as well. It may be revived as software project (time will tell), but as an OS for hardware players it's basically dead already...

They are also not the most interesting ones either because of their relative closedness, but they might become more interesting in the future (there are many good things about them as well).

"Relative closedness"? Retaive to what? Symbian? MeeGo? Freerunner? Dead platforms, dead products... Like it or not Android is the most open viable platform today. If there are lots of companies who create more open hardware platforms I sure would like to hear about that.

Yes and no. You don't really need open OS, but you need open hardware.

Yes, and that's what we have today (of course even more open hw is always welcome than just "all host CPU driver sw is free") and I don't think it's going away.

I would like to share your optimism. I really do. But I fail to see what's it's based on. Hardware becomes more closed over time, not less. And if you want to provide some kind of platform you need the hardware to run it on. The most open widely available hardware is currently Android-based - and this is the most important factor.

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