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.