Hurray for openness and the community: "Over the last week, our Jason Parker (a.k.a. kornyone) has been playing with his Nexus Q, seeing how far he could push it and how capable it could be. It started with the basics (fastboot and adb pushing) and then Trebuchet, Netflix and other apps, followed by XBMC for Android. Well, now Jason is back with another breakthrough - CM9." Just keep beating that tired and worn drum of placing open between quotation marks, John. You're very convincing.
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Member since:
2012-04-05
Member since:2005-06-29
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Member since:2012-04-05
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Member since:2005-06-29
You know just as well as I do that's not his reason or putting quotes around "open".
He's just blindly following the party line.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8072542/Google-Android-...
Member since:2009-06-20
Member since:
2011-04-11
You know just as well as I do that's not his reason or putting quotes around "open".
To be frank, Android as offered in the Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus Tablet and Nexus Q doesn't meet any definition of "open".
It's not open source, since not only some userland apps, but also most drivers and codecs important for the function of the device that can't be removed, are closed source. So, it's mixed.
It's not open, because the APIs used for hardware video acceleration are not open in any of the 4 devices (an open device must have all of it's APIs documented).
So yeah, Android is "open". The existence of Cyanogen is not a proof of openness. Cyanogen just uses the same binary blobs vanilla Android uses.
Edited 2012-07-16 22:39 UTC
Member since:2009-06-20
Member since:
2011-04-11
With your definition, Linux is not open. It only works with binary blobs
Linux can be compiled into a working product without the binary blobs, because at least some drivers for some hardware and PCs are open source. Instead, the Android source code dump does not contain open source drivers for not even one phone/tablet. You can not compile Android into a working product for any phone/tablet yet. But hey, Google wants us to believe that the Android running on their Nexus devices is "open source". This is what I hate. Just call the Android running on the Nexus devices "mixed" or "mostly open source", but not open source.
Also, it's not about whether you can run proprietary apps, but whether the OS ships with proprietary apps.