Business models and open source

Posted Apr 18, 2019 12:09 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418)
In reply to: Business models and open source by tchernobog
Parent article: Business models and open source

It's not just connotation. There a billion or so computers running open source android that is not free software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-poi...

> Second, and more important in practice, many products containing computers check signatures on their executable programs to block users from installing different executables; only one privileged company can make executables that can run in the device or can access its full capabilities. We call these devices “tyrants”, and the practice is called “tivoization” after the product (Tivo) where we first saw it. Even if the executable is made from free source code, the users cannot run modified versions of it, so the executable is nonfree.

> The criteria for open source do not recognize this issue; they are concerned solely with the licensing of the source code. Thus, these unmodifiable executables, when made from source code such as Linux that is open source and free, are open source but not free. Many Android products contain nonfree tivoized executables of Linux.

Business models and open source

Posted Apr 18, 2019 12:14 UTC (Thu) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (1 responses)

And I shouldn't have said open source android since almost all shipping versions of android except replicant include completely proprietary software by everyone's definition.

Business models and open source

Posted Apr 23, 2019 8:36 UTC (Tue) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> And I shouldn't have said open source android since almost all shipping versions of android except replicant include completely proprietary software by everyone's definition.

It seems to me that Android also contains a lot of software which is free by common definitions. To my mind (perhaps I am prejudiced, I work on VirtualBox), having software projects which mix free and non-free software is better than not having projects containing free software, and if the non-free parts make it financially feasible to create the free parts which would otherwise not have been created that seems acceptable to me. Perhaps it would have been possible to make it work without the non-free parts, but if the people involved did not know how that does not really help. Perhaps the partially free software prevented something fully free from being created because it was good enough. I doubt that is often the case but can't prove it.

I suppose in the end whether a free and non-free mix is better than nothing at all will depend on the point of view of the person deciding. I like free software, but I don't see it as a moral goal in itself, though I do see it as a potentially useful tool for achieving other moral goals. Other people may (and probably do) disagree.