

Android and the false promises of openness - nkurz
http://haineault.com/blog/167/

======
bozho
You said it "I need to root my phone and thus void my warranty". If you void
your warranty you are free to do whatever you like with your phone. If it was
"truly open", you wouldn't have a warranty.

It's always a balance - do you want something you have complete control over,
including the possibility to break it, or you want limited control but be sure
that even if it breaks, you get a new one? The platform itself is "open
enough", but manufacturers and carriers are making a business out of it.

And for the record, I think you can click "clear data", and also use some
process monitor to kill your unwanted apps. My facebook app doesn't have these
issues

~~~
yardie
For a counter example: cars.

Adding an aftermarket radio doesn't void your warranty. Switching out the
muffler for a Cherrybomb doesn't void the warranty. AFAIK the car warranty
stays in place for all parts except the parts you change or that interact
directly with the warrantied part. ie you lose the engine/transmission
warranty if you switch out the ECU but not if you install install an
intercooler.

I've rooted a few Android phones and I don't see anything in the software that
could physically break the hardware. So I don't understand why the warranty is
void. If they don't want to provide tech support to rooted phone, fine.
Reinstall OEM Android and get on with it.

~~~
rbanffy
> I don't see anything in the software that could physically break the
> hardware

Cyanogenmod has some scary clock options. I think you can easily overheat your
phone if you get too careless with the processor clock.

~~~
yardie
It also has thermal protection built-in. I've also tried to overclock my
handset to the highest allowable speed under CM7. It rebooted and the only
cost was 5 minutes of my time.

------
JoeAltmaier
Related to the American model of phone purchasing, where phones are leveraged
through contract costs. Kind of like leasing the phone.

Other countries, you buy your phone, you lease your service. Owning your
phone, you can do anything you like with it.

~~~
danmaz74
Exactly. I don't see how this is in any way related to Android being open or
not...

------
zobzu
By reading the comments I figured the biggest issue with "open source" is that
it is misunderstood, and terms are abused in various directions which have
different meanings.

Generally people use FOSS (Free Open Source Software) as the term to coin the
meaning: "its open source, without compromises. It will never be closed, even
for a while. AKA it's open source AND free as in freedom - yours - not the
companies".

Ends up in a BSD (pro for companies) vs GPL (pro for the users) fight usually.
You'd think most would prefer GPL, but many of us actually work for companies
and vote BSD (or similar) because it helps the hand that feed them. (I
certainly vote GPL)

The GPLv3 added some more depth to the understanding of FOSS - it's been
criticized, also by M. Torvalds, who's getting most contributions from people
working for said companies. The level of depth is simple: not only the
software code must be available, possible to build and reproduce, but you must
be able to do that on your device, that one which you own.

It's all about power and control. They want to control you. Eg, have Facebook
installed and potentially running even if you don't use it. That's control.
That your warranty becomes void if you root the phone, that's for control too.
They don't want _you_ to be in control. That's a good part of what FOSS is
about: ensure that _you_ stay in control. And that's also what simple OSS
(Open Source Software) does not provide.

An I think that's important for our future, as software takes a big part of
our lives.

~~~
bergie
I think the question should be more about project governance, not about
license details. Android may be open source by license, but it is not by
process.

[http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/open_source-free_software-
what_we_...](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/open_source-free_software-
what_we_need_is_open_projects/)

MeeGo had the potential to provide a better-governed alternative, but that was
unfortunately squandered

------
biafra
Android is that much open that you can buy closed versions of it. Yeah, I know
that sounds silly.

If you really want the open Android you have to get a phone with an unlocked
bootloader and compile AOSP for yourself. Then you can remove or add whatever
you want.

------
machrider
It's not truly open but Android (as a platform) does seem to be moving in the
right direction. I'm not an Android OS hacker, but as an outsider, my
complaint would be that it is apparently very hard to get AOSP up and running
on an off-the-shelf phone today. This is from my personal experience of trying
several ROMs on my Galaxy S and finding that many are extremely unstable. It
seems like the dev teams have to work very hard to make basic things like
phone calls and the GPS work correctly. Even the process of installing a ROM
and flashing different bootloaders when you get stuck in a boot loop, etc,
just seems wrong.

But it's early to be complaining. The OSS revolution on PC hardware didn't
happen overnight. We now live in somewhat of a golden age where people can run
100% open software on their PCs, and in a lot of cases it also "Just works". I
hope Android continues to mature in that direction such that, eventually, it
will be a matter of selecting a distro and installing it on your phone (and
getting exactly the behavior you want from your phone).

Today you can run a custom ROM, but it is pretty hacky, involving trolling
forums and downloading a few zipfiles and hoping they will unpack and run
correctly. (And "rooting" your phone.) And it can go horribly wrong (I seem to
have damaged the "download mode" on my phone the last time around, but
fortunately I've ended up with a stable 2.2 system). In a couple years time,
I'm hoping the landscape will look a little more like the Linux/PC world we
have now. It may be that we'll have to stop hoping Google will be our
benevolent dictator and form an independent Android OSS community, though.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Is it moving in the right direction?

This is an open source project that hasn't done a code release for the last
few versions (covering almost a year) and is tightening the licensing
agreements to exert control (and doing so in such a way that anyone who isn't
a proper licensee will struggle to compete).

Yes they've said that they'll open it up again once Ice Cream Sandwich is out
but I'm unconvinced by a company who close off the source as and when it suits
them. It feels closer to some sort of "shared source" model than open source.

It might be better than the Apple iOS / Microsoft Windows Phone model (though
I'm not 100% clear exactly how much better) but it seems to stop a long, long
way short of the ideal.

EDIT: Sorry, being a bit unclear in what I mean by shared source. I was trying
to differentiate between projects than run in a open / collaborative way and
those where they just publish the code after the event. I wasn't aware that
shared source had already been coined to describe a particular model.

~~~
drivebyacct2
>This is an open source project that hasn't done a code release for the last
few versions

what? Honeycomb's source (and only the ONE revision of Android) was not
released and I can spout off the three most popular theories, but it doesn't
really matter. We've been round and round this many times. If Google chooses
to skip releasing 3.0 source, why is that particularly different than me
choosing to develop on my own private Git repo and jump from version 1.0 to
3.0 while only releasing 2.0 in binary form. Is it "less" open source? Depends
on how you want to define "is" and "open source" I suppose, but I'm inclined
to enjoy it. As far as I'm concerned it's "open source enough", in that both
my D1 and Fascinate are running fully open source operating systems (aside
from proprietary drivers obviously).

>is tightening the licensing agreements to exert control (and doing so in such
a way that anyone who isn't a proper licensee will struggle to compete).

Um, no they're not. The licenses are the same for both AOSP and the terms for
getting Google Apps are the same still.

Not much of this post is factual. Like, hardly if any of it is.

\-- tl;dr Google fails to release code for ONE revision of Android and has the
exact same licensing terms for AOSP and Google Apps as always. And I get
downvoted. Cool.

~~~
zobzu
The point of HC (which is slightly off topic, but i'll bite), is that Google
proved they can't be trusted about always releasing the source.

This simply means the next version of Android might or might not be open
source. Then the next, next one too.

It means also, if in 2 years 99% of the market runs Android and Google decides
to take several choices that users may object about, they can just close the
source forever.

Of course, since its not GPL licensed, they could always close the source
forever - even if they had open sourced the OS every time in the past (but
they did not.).

So it's about trust, and the trust is gone.

~~~
bruce511
>> The point of HC is that Google proved they can't be trusted about always
releasing the source.

um - they're not exactly the first company to develop a commercial offering on
top of an earlier open-source offering. So I'm not sure what your point here
is.

As I understand it, an open source license allows you to get the code to
software you are _already running_ not some commitment by the producer to
release future versions of the software under an open license in perpetuity.

>> Of course, since its not GPL licensed, they could always close the source
forever - even if they had open sourced the OS every time in the past

As I understand the GPL, even if current versions of Android were GPL'd,
future versions would not necessarily be so, since the only person affected
would be the copyright holder.

IANAL but since Google holds the copyright for Android code, they'd be free to
license it under some other license as well, and then derive from that. This
seems to be very common in open source projects (dual licensing I mean).

In short - an Open Source license gives you access to current, not future,
code. And the copyright holder of the code can release derived versions which
are not Open Source.

------
drivebyacct2
What does the ability to remove built in apps have to do with openness?
Seriously, this is a piss poor reason to try to attack Android's openness.
This is just a design choice on the part of people who ship phones. Be upset
that manufacturers put their apps into /system/app and not /data/app, so that
they would be removable. (Though most of the time, the space available to the
ROM and user installable apps are partitioned and not shared). Open or not,
removing data from the read only /system partition requires root. It's not a
matter of "openness".

Heck, the comments there do a plenty good job of describing what I've just
detailed. Besides, rooting and custom firmwares are not illegal and most of
the time will not stand up in court as warranty violations (at least surely
not outside of the United States).

~~~
MattBearman
In the thread he says he's got a Nexus One. Unless I'm mistaken, Google Nexus
phones come with a raw version of Android installed, with none of the
bloatware that the manufacturers of carriers like to bake in.

This means that Android itself is not allowing him to remove Facebook (or
Twitter), and I'm inclined to agree that it goes against the 'open' label that
Google like to put on android.

Having said that, I completely agree that if you want a truly open phone, you
can't expect a warranty as well, that would be having your cake and eating it.

~~~
bodski
The OP states further down that the issue they have is with the carrier:

 _"I have to agree that my carrier is more to blame than Google or Android.
After all, the facebook app isn't in the android source tree. It was
introduced and locked in by my carrier.

My grippe is more about Android being touted left and right as a the first
Open mobile platform while when it reaches the end user it's been locked by
the carrier.

But indeed, my diatribe should have been more targeted to my carrier."_

~~~
MattBearman
Fair enough, didn't realise you could get Nexus phones from a carrier, I
though Google only sold them direct.

------
sylvanaar
This reminds me of Republican politics - while you were busy hating Apple (or
gays in the case of Republicans) - they were busy with their real work -
making deals that don't have your best interest in mind.

