Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker
I don't think Android is "open" at all, it's just "less closed" than the competition.
For example:
- Large parts of the Android userland are not open source.
- Pretty much all Android code is made by Google. There are no public discussions on anything, really.
- Almost all Android drivers are closed-source (they're usually not provided by Google but by the phone vendors).
- Most Android phones are "locked", you need all sorts of stupid tricks ("hacks") to do stuff with them (like, install a different OS/ROM, unlock more features, etc).
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Which gives some weight to the idea Richard Stallman has had significant influence on developers when you consider the apparent motivations of the few people who are trying to get to a completely free software smart phone platform. As far as I know (and all I know of this comes from FSF bulletins so my view could be very skewed), the main people working on purely free software alternatives like F-Droid and Replicant seem to be wholly in the FSF camp.
Whoops, okay, looks like I'm off here if you look at Cyanogenmod perhaps being a more significant effort. I'm unclear what their motivations are or were.
Still, don't surveys of free or open source software developers tend to show a significant portion who list as motivation or partial motivation ideological reasons that sound a lot like what rms and friends promote? I don't see very much of the crusade feel or phrasing it as a moral question from any other camp. Maybe the world didn't need that to get some large amount of open source software but it can't have hurt. He's certainly influenced my thinking, not that I'm contributing much of anything.