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.
… you got a real hard-on for Jon Gruber, don’t ya ‘Tom’ ;-D
The two items came right after each other in my RSS feed, and the disconnect between reality and Jon’s world made me smile.
I incorrectly corrected you on the spelling there – sorry about that 😉
Err, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gruber
Thanks for pointing out my mistake – I should have checked before I posted
I don’t understand why anyone still cares what FM or Gruber write.
Sorry Thom, when it comes to objectivity both you and Gruber are both petty and weak.
I’ve seen you rise to a good cause. I’ve seen you bleat on about the same old tired divisions (never taking a specific side, always finding fault in the same old tired arguments.)
Gruber is more of the same. But throughout all his Mac zealotry, he *does* support some surprising causes. Not everything shines out of the Cupertino campus.
One final point. Context is important. From my stand point, I’d tend to agree about the quotes around open with regards to the ouya. At the moment it is pure vapour. It *may* one day exist, but till it does, no one, and I mean NO ONE, outside of the company producing the platform can know for sure anything specific about it. All you have at the moment is “Android” (open, save binary blobs) and an unknown and vague hardware platform. Nothing more.
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-…
The ouya is not made yet, that is why Gruber puts “open” between quotes.
Yeah, that makes so much sense. Thanks, henderson101!
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
Plus royaliste que le roi !
With your definition, Linux is not open. It only works with binary blobs and -oh my god!- I can run proprietary apps in userland! What has the world come to!
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.