“Google said on Saturday that Chinese authorities have approved its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings, the last regulatory hurdle to a deal that would allow the world’s No. 1 Internet search engine to develop its own line of smart phones.” The main requirement from the Chinese government? Google needs to keep Android open and free for at least five years. I’m guessing that’s the time Baidu needs to properly fork Android.
Since when Android is “open source”? Their source misses neccessary multimedia codecs, it’s not just the Google experience apps. Othetwise we wouldn’t need ReplicantOS. I am really not a free software evangelists, but if i you can’t compile it from the sources, it’s not open source, it’s mixed model. I guess China meant Android’s source to remain “as open as it is now”.
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You can build from source but the reason it’s incomplete because of proprietary hardware/software like:
Orientation Sensor
Wifi
Bluetooth
GPS
Graphics
NFC
CDMA
WiMAX
It’s currently well nigh impossible to build a completely free mobile phone. Don’t blame Android for something that’s been happening for the last 30 years.
The fact that you can build your own OS from source with proprietary blobs is light years ahead of what we used to have. No choice at all.
Moreover, ARM is not a specific processor, it’s a processor spec. Manufacturers are free to add and remove whatever they wish from the final processor, so any OS that supports ARM is up against the whim of the processor used by the manufacturer. As most of the features of the processor (or SOC) are often supplied as proprietary, the OS in question will have binary blobs. This is without taking in to account discrete chips used to supply functionality not on the die. Chip manufacturers are in the business of putting hurdles and NDAs in the way of hardware development because it drives business.
One of the reasons to look forward to Intel phones. There is a lot of geek hate for the x86 line, but Intel has been great at standardizing things and usually offering reference implementations (or at minimum, given Linux developers and such the information necessary to make implementations).
This wont cover quite everything of course, but just getting a fully documented processor, bus and GPU into a phone will be huge process. We should already thank Intel for USB, which is helping us with all phones already. It certainly wasn’t cheap to develop, but Intel still pretty much gave their work away to anyone and everyone to integrate.
Interesting considering that we are talking about a US company buying another US company, seems like an internal matter and none of their business. Which is what the Chinese would be yelling at us about if we told them which companies they can buy in their own country.
There, fixed (and I’m sure there’s more)
“You can build from source but the reason it’s incomplete because of proprietary hardware/software like:”
Some multimedia codecs are also mising.
Just like in every other Linux distro. Gotta love MPEG-LA-ish licensing terms…
Looks like they’ve already started working on it.
http://beat.baidu.com/?p=5209