Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] any one using ubuntu phones?
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2015 13:47:48
Message-Id: CAGfcS_mn4A0hVOvF0Su77ZtVG-G97sZx+_8QSz5ggxJJM6G90A@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] any one using ubuntu phones? by behrouz khosravi
1 On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 9:03 AM, behrouz khosravi <bz.khosravi@×××××.com> wrote:
2 >
3 > I love to get ride of android altogether!
4 > I would love to see a platform open enough that I am able to install my
5 > bootloader on it easily and boot what I prefer using a usb flash memory.
6 > This is what I consider as the linux or more appropriately free software
7 > ecosystem.
8
9 It sounds like your problem isn't with Android (which is mostly FOSS -
10 or at least the parts you're dealing with here are), but with the
11 bootloader on your phone (which is proprietary). A vendor can just as
12 easily lock down a PC so that it will only run a version of Ubuntu 14
13 that they issue, without a lot of hacking away at it (and that is only
14 possible because Ubuntu isn't really designed to be secure against
15 such things - if they went to something with a signed /usr and noexec
16 everything else and used kernel signature verification then you're
17 fully locked in).
18
19 > I dont know whay we are not there yet, touch screen is just another input
20 > device, baseband modulator and demodulators are just another device attached
21 > to the CPU.
22 >
23
24 FOSS developers seem to mostly be stuck in X11-land - it scratches
25 their itch which tends to be on the desktop. While touch screen is
26 "just another input device" the fact is that you need to design your
27 entire application UI around it. Likewise there are a lot of other
28 considerations when going mobile, like syncronization of data. A lot
29 of FOSS software isn't really designed around a paradigm of working
30 with the same data with multiple devices.
31
32 There is no cloud equivalent to LibreOffice yet either.
33
34 Another challenge is that our most popular licenses (GPL) are designed
35 around desktop applications and not the cloud. That means that I can
36 take LibreOffice, make a million changes, give it a web UI, launch a
37 Google Docs competitor, and not release the source code to anybody,
38 since I'm not redistributing the binary. So, when companies do
39 leverage FOSS in the cloud we don't get the benefits. If everybody
40 exclusively used AGPLv3 for their work, then we'd probably see a lot
41 more FOSS investment in cloud-based software.
42
43 --
44 Rich

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] any one using ubuntu phones? behrouz khosravi <bz.khosravi@×××××.com>