Firefox OS on the ZTE Open [LWN.net]

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 4, 2013 21:13 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Firefox OS on the ZTE Open by cstanhop
Parent article: Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Mozilla is emphasizing "developing" markets because developed markets are already lost to it. Think about it: today most phones sold are smartphones, but of course in wealthy countries this percentage is over 50% (which means that FirefoxOS have no hope there) but in "developing" markets they have some chance.

Not a big chance, mind you: Mozilla's strategy is good, but they are too late. Android users outnumber iOS users by a huge margin but sales are still over 2x in favor of Apple's creation. Of course Apple is the sole gatekeeper for iOS while you can buy Android programs on Amazon or in plethora of Chinese stores thus in reality Android and iOS are more-or-less the same (but with Android you actually need to deal with multiple stores, different APIs in said stores, etc), but for that to happen Android needed about 4 times more users. For FirefoxOS to repeat that feat you need 4x more users then Android has... and given the stats that basically means that FirefoxOS must somehow capture all the remaining mobile phone owners. Totally unrealistic.

Their only real hope is some fatal mistake on Apple's or Google's part. I don't know… huge spat with Samsung or something like that. In the absence of that the best they can hope for is OS/2 fate (in In 1993-94, several major German retailers offered systems preloaded with OS/2, but eventually these offers withered and died and OS/2 followed, too).

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Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 5, 2013 12:32 UTC (Thu) by cov (subscriber, #84351) [Link]

I don't think the revenue generated by proprietary third-party application developers has as obvious or clear a correlation to the success of an operating system distribution as you seem to imply.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 5, 2013 15:26 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I don't think the revenue generated by proprietary third-party application developers has as obvious or clear a correlation to the success of an operating system distribution as you seem to imply.

I don't think you understand what that word means. Correlation is most definitely there, it's not even something worth discussing. Now, causation is another matter: as everyone knows correlation does not imply causation which means that it's possible that something else (besides potential revenue stream) determines both how popular given OS will among users and how lucrative it'll be for developers.

But simple explanation is often correct and Occam's razor says that we'll need some additional data if we are to decide that something else can affect popularity of platform to such a degree that it ca make platfrom which attracts few developers extremely popular.

In fact Linux developers tried to find out what else can affect popularity: they made absolutely sure Linux is not be lucrative to third-party developers and then tried basically everything else to attract users. Result is two decades of failures and insane popularity of the first platform which made Linux actually lucrative. I don't see what other explanation can describe all observable effects!

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 5, 2013 18:22 UTC (Thu) by watkin5 (subscriber, #36313) [Link]

I'm gob smacked. How can you state, "... everyone knows correlation does not imply causation ..." with out the correct link?

Виктор, Вы неправы

Posted Sep 13, 2013 20:24 UTC (Fri) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Yup, that kind of "everyone and his dog SURELY knows" reasoning is spotted in the wild along with attempts to cover up real world problems.

Correlation is a tool which can be useful to notice causation.

Like with Nth case of finding WMD in Mid East countries by pure accident and without any will to bomb a country into ruins swarming with fanatics instead of bombing it into democracy.

And yes, my correlometer tends to treat wikipedia links correctly: as links to *unauthoritative* source that is known to be manipulatable.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 8:59 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Personally I don't want any operating system that offers an ecosystem of proprietary third-party software anywhere near any of the devices I use. For me the "success" of an operating system is defined as inversely proportional to how much non-free software it exposes me to. For me, the most popular operating systems today are unsuccessful and always will be. The two-decade "failure" of Linux that you describe is for me a success story.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 11:08 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Personally I don't want any operating system that offers an ecosystem of proprietary third-party software anywhere near any of the devices I use. For me the "success" of an operating system is defined as inversely proportional to how much non-free software it exposes me to.

IOW: you don't want an OS which can be used on real hardware for real work. Got that. What are you still doing on LWN, then? Why don't you go and switch to truly free OS (like KolibriOS or something like this)?

The two-decade "failure" of Linux that you describe is for me a success story.

Not really. Linux is miserable failure by your measures: it's mostly used for "an ecosystem of proprietary third-party software" (on servers, nettop boxes and other similar devices, not on desktop). You can claim that only desktop Linux is a success, but this will be inconsistent since all these "successful" desktop efforts are funded by it's "failure" on servers, routers and [recently] mobile phones.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 17:27 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

Or even worse, the current situation with Android where you have a half open and half closed system where almost all of the apps are either entirely closed or shareware/nagware/adware.

You get all of the fail from both open and closed and the only upside is the OEM and carrier buyin because they seem to like the idea.

Really, go look at the Play Store. Four classes of offerings:

1. Google closed source apps increasingly built on their 100% closed OS on an OS Play Services platform.

2. One man band shareware apps where you get the poor customer service implied by an small vendor, the uncertain future of depending on a single guy who at any point can decide it ain't worth it and stop development. Similar to any small open source project. But because it is shareware there is no source and no option for anyone else to pick up and carry on. So a lot of wheels get reinvented and the same basic app is posted a dozen times, each hoping to score a few dollars instead of collaborate one one or two really good apps.

3, Pure commercial software from larger shops. Think Angry Birds.

4. Real Free Software. This category is very rare. Even most of the core 'rooting' and other hacking tools are shareware. And this mindset means information is hoarded instead of shared. Go read xda-developers and see how often partial disclosures are made with a pitch to buy an app to actually implement. (The one I hit yesterday was triangleaway.) This makes coming up to speed on how Android works on real hardware is much harder than it should be.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 18:17 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

good points. k9 mail and firefox are probably the only two "daily use" apps i run on android that meet any open-ness test....sort of sad.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 19:16 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

What can I say… welcome to real world!

That's how most successful platforms look like (exceptions are even more closed: see iOS). It's the same on server, on routers and other places where Linux is actually successful, too. With perhaps smaller number of "one man band shareware apps", but that's because simple application which you can use to swindle couple of dollars from Joe Average are not all that successful among the more technical-minded public. But closed-source software and partial disclosures are norm there, too.

You can try to carve a niche for "true" FOSS software among all that chaos (with Android the natural approach will be to use Nexus devices and/or other easily openable devices, with routers you'll need to carefully select device supportable by OpenWRT), but if you'll insist on "FOSS way or the highway" then you'll quickly find out that Joe Average chooses highway 9 times out of 10.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 23:37 UTC (Fri) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]

So? All you did is make a post that boils down to agreeing with me, that if you are the sort who runs Linux (see the masthead of the site you are posting on) that Android is about as useful as Windows or OS X or iOS. Probably less so since the bulk of the App space is shareware vs commercial software. Shareware tends to combine the worst parts of Open Source and Commercial software into a big ball of fail.

And yes all of my machines at home run some sort of Linux with an OpenWRT gateway and all but one machine at work does as well. And yes I have the f-droid repo installed on my phone.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 7, 2013 0:19 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

All you did is make a post that boils down to agreeing with me, that if you are the sort who runs Linux (see the masthead of the site you are posting on) that Android is about as useful as Windows or OS X or iOS.

WTF? Do you really want to imply that people who run Linux automatically reject proprietary software? Sorry to disappoint you, but that's not true at all. I know a lot of Linux users who are more then happy to use non-free software (especially if we are talking about things like games). This means Android is more then relevant to the LWN: this is, finally, version of Linux which you can actually use to do real work without fighting it tooth and nail at every step and if this version of Linux fails "ideological purity" test then so be it.

Probably less so since the bulk of the App space is shareware vs commercial software.

That's true for Windows and iOS as well. Sure, there are some commercial packages, but most applications are shareware programs with one or two developers behind them.

And yes all of my machines at home run some sort of Linux with an OpenWRT gateway and all but one machine at work does as well. And yes I have the f-droid repo installed on my phone.

Well, that's your choice. I use an OpenWRT router, too, but I that's because I wanted to make sure it can do some things which are hard to do on stock firmware. What this has to do with anything?

I think you've mixed sites. This is Linux Weekly News, not FSF-zealots Weekly News and not RMS-lovers Weekly News. Linus is Linux's soul and he quite explicitly said in the Forbes interview: The thing that makes me not want to use the GPLv3 in its current form is that it really tries to move more toward the “software freedom” goals. You really can't be more explicit then that.

Android is the Linux distribution exactly because it's possible and easy to write programs for it - even "evil" unfree ones. Linus was always apathetic to proprietary software (he prefers free software but his preference is pragmatic one, not ideological one) but Linux distributions traditionally liked to make life difficult for the proprietary software writers (especially for small shareware-like proprietary software writers) and Android finally brings userspace policy to match original Linus intent.

P.S. My only dislike of Android is the fact that it had thrown away the only pieces of GNU/Linux which were already usable for software writers (proprietary and free ones alike): coreutils, bash, gcc, glibc, etc. This is sad, but understandable: most of these were actually FSF's projects, ironically enough, and after FSF tried to change them to become "weapon of mass opinion" the only logical choice was to abandon them. I think only glibc is still not converted but it can be converted at any time thus from Android authors POV it was probably easier to cut ties early rather then to try to keep fork going after license change.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 9, 2013 15:13 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

"Weapons of Mass Opinion".

Amazingly, I've never heard that before. And I love it. Thanks for starting my week off right.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 19:54 UTC (Fri) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link]

Have a look at http://f-droid.org for really Free Software. Almost 750 apps are included right now.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 20:02 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I'm pretty sure there are more open-source application on Google Play then that. The only problem: there are few thousand applications besides million of proprietary ones thus ratio does not look all that good. But it's similar to MacOS, Windows or any other popular OS with vibrant ecosystem thus I'm not complaining.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 20:15 UTC (Fri) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link]

Well, it's a little bit different: In contrast to free software for desktops, many free software programs built for Google Play include the non-free admob lib or even other obscure libs making it a hassle to build them with Free Software only.
And within f-droid, the ratio is 1:0. :)

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 9, 2013 8:10 UTC (Mon) by korpenkraxar (guest, #75003) [Link]

Is it possible to search the Google Play store by licences somehow to locate FLOSS?

If not, then presumably, this is a "do no evil" goodwill gesture that Google would be quite likely implement if there was a public petition that received some traction.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 9, 2013 9:13 UTC (Mon) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link]

Look what F-Droid thinks about it:
https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/maintaining-a-directory-...

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 9, 2013 15:18 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

Very nice; thanks.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 17:46 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Supposedly FirefoxOS has a number things going for it:
- FirefoxOS needs less resources to run than an Android phone

- there are 6 million webdevelopers and 'only' a couple of 100000 app developers for Android and iOS combined, many are even HTML5-apps with a native wrapper

- it's open source and I've heared it has an update process which updates the top part of FirefoxOS (so not the kernel and binaries) on regular basis. Just like Firefox and Chrome on the desktop

- there are still a lot more people with feature phones than smartphones. There are 6 billion phones in use, only 1.1 are smartphones. Most of these people don't life in a western country and don't have a smartphone partly because of price. A FirefoxOS can already be had for only 3 euros a month (for the fist 3 months, data is free the first 3 months).

Even if FirefoxOS fails, Mozilla has produces a whole slew of new WebAPIs:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI

Most of them have been proposed as standards at W3C and a number of them have become standards.

Including a new payment system for the web to bring a one-click payment system to the web. Just like the app-store model now has.

So still a win in Mozilla's book if it improves the web.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 21:14 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

Supposedly FirefoxOS has a number things going for it:
[...]
- there are 6 million webdevelopers and 'only' a couple of 100000 app developers for Android and iOS combined, many are even HTML5-apps with a native wrapper

So you're saying that it's an advantage for FirefoxOS to only run web apps, vs. an Android phone being able to run either web apps or Android apps?

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 23:29 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Well, the goal of FirefoxOS is to be able to run web apps better on the same hardware.

Their slogan of their developer education/evangelism/promos videos is:

"Firefox OS: the platform HTML5 deserves"

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 6, 2013 22:13 UTC (Fri) by liam (subscriber, #84133) [Link]

- FirefoxOS needs less resources to run than an Android phone

I hope this is true, but thus far its only been said and not demonstrated.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 7, 2013 13:18 UTC (Sat) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

FirefoxOS can run Web apps and a good Web browser on phones that can't possibly run Chrome on Android (and the Android "stock browser" is rubbish).

For Web browsing and running Web apps, running both Android's frameworks and a Web browser is a lot of overhead on low-end phones.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 9, 2013 14:38 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

But users don't care about HTML5 and for them native apps (and there are way more native Android apps then good HTML5 apps) are better: faster, less battery-hungry, etc.

In a world where there are millions of HTML5 applications and few Android ones FirefoxOS will make sense, but this is not our world right now.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 9, 2013 22:25 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

There are a very large number of Web sites that don't have an equivalent Android app.

It remains to be seen whether the average "native Android app" (I can't tell whether you mean NDK apps or Dalvik apps) is "faster, less battery-hungry, etc" than the average FirefoxOS HTML5 app or Web page in the FirefoxOS browser.

Firefox OS on the ZTE Open

Posted Sep 10, 2013 18:17 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

For a lot of time facebook's mobile web interface was better, faster, less battery-hungry than and as featureful as its dalvik-application. AND it didn't nag you with notifications all the time.