The Android Dev Phone 1

Posted Jan 9, 2009 13:22 UTC (Fri) by Cato (guest, #7643)
In reply to: The Android Dev Phone 1 by jlokier
Parent article: The Android Dev Phone 1

Firing up a web browser to run a web app is ridiculously easy. Each web app takes little extra resource on the netbook client.

Installing Windows on top of Linux is a lot of work - buy a licensed copy of Windows (£140/$200+ in UK for XP Pro, via eBay sellers only as it's end-of-life), install it, get it activated by Microsoft (which can involve a phone call), install required Windows updates, then install antivirus, antispyware, personal firewall, Firefox, etc, etc. You need at least 1 GB spare to run XP comfortably with multiple apps, or 512 MB for a single main app.

There really isn't any comparison here.

You don't actually have to use the Gmail account required for Android, it seems, and forks of Android are legal. Removing XP product activation is illegal of course.

The Android Dev Phone 1

Posted Jan 10, 2009 2:12 UTC (Sat) by jlokier (guest, #52227) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure, Google is easier. The question was about what's acceptable, not what's easy or difficult.

The ease-of-use-is-all people can go sit in the "we don't care about open source" corner I guess.

The original article says that you _do_ have to use Google's Gmail if you want sensible functionality from the built in apps. You can use other providers, but things which should work don't work with them. My question still stands: why is that acceptable?

It's good that I can fork it.

In other words, I can turn a Google-requiring phone into an equivalently functional non-Google-requiring phone with some effort.

That is than Microsoft and Windows. But worse than something which works out of the box with other providers of identical online services.

Whether that is a real issue, or just ideology, depends on whether it stays that way, or if Android (the one from Google) interoperates well with other services.

Having to fork isn't an insurmountable barrier for a few individual users wanting to do neat things, but it is rather anticompetitive to service providers, since most users won't use a fork as long as the Google-requiring version is good enough.

The Android Dev Phone 1

Posted Jan 10, 2009 2:30 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

if these people really were in the "we don't care about open source" corner you are saying they belong in, they wouldn't have put things under an open source license that would allow you to fork the code either.

building the defaults to use google but allowing you to fork it to use whatever you want seems like a very reasonable thing to do. most people wouldn't use the fork because they don't have the alternate servers in place to support things (and if you don't trust google with the data, why should you trust any other company?) but those that do can either fork things themselves, or use a fork that someone else has created.