It's official: Google announces open-source mobile phone OS, Android (ars technica)

Well that's normal for any Linux thing. 

Users and providers can add any amount of proprietary crap they feel like.. Currently on the
desktop users load up ndiswrappers, nvidia drivers, google desktop, and all that sort of
thing.

It used to be common for distributions to do that sort of thing, until people got tired of it.
The big examples that come to mind right now would be RealPlayer and Yast (before Suse was
bought by Novell). Used to be marketted as 'value added add-ons' or some such thing.

People have spent years and flame wars on flame wars and use licenses like the LGPL, Mozilla,
and BSD for the specific _purpose_ of allowing non compatable and closed source licenses. 

The Linux Kernel folks derided the FSF goons for trying to prevent distributers from locking
down the OS via hardware by pushing the adoption of GPLv3 license.

So if google is allowing 'Android' to be used as a platform to lock down devices against users
and allow carriers to add a lot of proprietary cruft then that is
_exactly_what_the_copyright_holders_want_ to allow according to their licensing choices.

Google is mearly taking advantage of OSS and Linux to provide a base for marketing and running
their proprietary applications.. Exactly like how the licenceses used in Linux allow.

So Android OS isn't going to do change the status quo.

Now is this a horrible thing? 

Well yes and no. It's not because it's reality. Carriers won't adopt Linux without being able
to lock down end users. They are assholes like that and I find that behavior very
distastefull. But by allowing them to do this the Linux kernel developers are going to be able
to get open source drivers for the various hardware bits in mobile devices.

The end effect is that all a user has to do is find some way to break the DRM on these phones
and then they can have these devices 'liberated'. Linux makes this much more easier, then,
say, OS X does.

And this lowers the bar for people like the OpenMoko/Neo1973 folks. They can use the same
hardware, the latest and greatest stuff, as the big guys do but they don't have to do the DRM
against end users. I know for a fact that many people dislike carriers for the locking down
and the proprietary cruft they force down the throats on end users. 

Then it will be open market forces that leads to a more 'liberated' phone and handheld rather
then licensing games.. although the GPLv3 can help a long way I think.

Linux will help lower the bar dramaticly to competition between handheld makers and
carriers... In a open market this usually means a big win for us.

I was one of the people who ported Tornado to Linux.  A royal pain in the days of redhat 6.0.

If you look at what WRS actually said, they were talking about the issue of linking
proprietary code with GPL code, which *really* does not fly for lots of embedded vendors.  I
love open source, I release stuff I develop myself as open source, and I believe it is
ultimately essential for software infrastructure.  However, it is not always appropriate, and
for single-image designs on limited hardware, the GPL is a real embedded space issue.  This is
what WRS talked about and it was not FUD it is a practical concern.

What turned out to be the case was: the embedded market got less embedded, and single-image
became the exception not the rule.