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Richard Stallman: “Android Phones Do Not Respect Your Freedom”

192 points by dkd903 15y ago

biafra 15y ago
The original article by Stallman is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-fre...
rodh257 15y ago
We get it, this has been discussed over and over, Android 3.0 is not open source because the source was not released, can we move on now? Google will be releasing the source code to Ice Cream Sandwich, but for now, Android 3.0 is not open source. We didn't need Richard Stallman to tell us that.
- vixen99 15y ago
  In view of the ensuing discussion here, that may not be so. Beware the Royal 'we'. "It is also called the royal pronoun, the royal "we" or the Victorian "we." The more general word for the use of we to refer to oneself is nosism, from the Latin nos. It is most commonly used to denote the excellence, power, and dignity of the person that speaks or writes.:"
- RexRollman 15y ago
  So long as Google keeps referring to Android as open, I think the point needs to be brought up.
vegai 15y ago
Which ones do, I wonder?
- biafra 15y ago
  All those with a locked bootloader. BTW: Is there a complete list which ones have an unlocked or unlockable bootloader? I know about the following: - Android Dev Phone 1 (HTC Dream) - Ion (HTC Magic) - Motorola Droid (unfortunately not the Milestone) - Nexus One (HTC Passion) - Nexus S (relockable) (Samsung Crespo)
  - josteink 15y ago
    Samsung Galaxy S 1 & 2 (international versions).
  - vegardx 15y ago
    I think we're moving towards unlocked phones. Both HTC and Samsung have sent signals that they want to open up their phones. And then we're talking about drivers and specifications. Everything that can get them one step ahead of Apple. Also, it seem to be deemed "cool" to be open, so they might just spin it to marketing. Sadly I don't know if this will be the case for US, where the operators have way too much control over the devices. Luckily I live in Europe, outside of EU. :-)
danielhunt 15y ago
...Do Not Respect Your Software Freedom. Note that (pretty important) word left out there? Yeah. Linkbait.
- angrycoder 15y ago
  Its Richard Stallman, did you really think the article was going to be about your freedom to eat tacos?
- hetman 15y ago
  Could you define freedom?
outside1234 15y ago
i want to like rms but you get the sense that he doesn't live in the real world whenever you read his stuff. I mean, seriously, Android is about a lightyear more open than iOS and there are super good reasons Honeycomb is not out. An OEM in China would promptly put out some sort of crappy phone that uses it and wrecks the Android brand.
- lurker19 15y ago
  What has RMS written that is not real? He knows that some non-free software is compelling and profitable, but he argues that in the long run of is unstainable. And when you look at Lion and Metro and Google Apps' only half-baked Data Liberation Front and compare to what RMS wrote 20 years ago, it is clear he is very much in the real world, unfortunately. Is Android the least evil? Probably. But it is still not free. And RMS doesn't say you mustn't Android and whatever else; he just days that you shouldn't if you want to protect and promote software freedom, and he is a living model of an example free software lifestyle, for better or worse.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    he just days that you shouldn't if you want to protect and promote software freedom So what phone do I use then? There's a couple select phones that might qualify, but they are fringe, expensive and impractical. This is what your parent is referring to. When people talk about how rms doesn't "live in the real world" they are coming from a "people who, at the end of the day, have to get sh*t done" point of view. Both viewpoints have their merits.
- 0x12 15y ago
  > An OEM in China would promptly put out some sort of crappy phone that uses it and wrecks the Android brand. They're totally free to do that right now, they don't need a more open version of android for that. It's not as if google is limiting who has or does not have access to the platform. The issue that RMS is trying to address is one that matters to a small subset of those that buy the phones, your ability to modify the code and improve it. The price of the lowest end android smartphones is dropping so fast there won't be any room left at the bottom for a hypothetical even lower end phone. As for android being 'more open than ios' RMS makes that point in the article.
bleakgadfly 15y ago
If we'd follow everything Stallman said we'd all be "surfing the web" one email at a time (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134336/focus=134979 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134336/focus=1...)
- lurker19 15y ago
  Are you trying to discredit him by making fun of the way he organizes his reading to optimize his productive time and spotty Internet connectivity when traveling? Instapaper, much beloved in these parts, is a fancy modern take on the same idea as RMS's web-to-email system.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - wmf 15y ago
    Or you could see it as a symptom of how much RMS has isolated himself from the world and how that hurts his campaign. Years after AJAX had become boring, RMS finally discovered that JavaScript exists and wrote a rant about how evil it is. When someone suggested that Emacs switch to Git, RMS basically said "I'm not going to read any Git documentation, someone please explain it to me". I wouldn't be surprised if he discovered the whole Honeycomb debate just in time for it to be over. The world is moving on and he's paying no attention.
- Marwy 15y ago
  He states that he does this for personal reasons. To me it sounds like: "I know it's slow, but I don't want to waste my time sitting on HN all day long, so I'll just download what I need to".
jarin 15y ago
Stallman never misses an opportunity to bring up the Linux vs. GNU/Linux distinction.
- arkx 15y ago
  Carthago delenda est.
biafra 15y ago
I think Stallman raises some interesting and valid points (in his article in the guardian. It is worth reading it to the end). For example this: "On most Android phones, this firmware has so much control that it could turn the product into a listening device. On some, it controls the microphone. On some, it can take full control of the main computer, through shared memory, and can thus override or replace whatever free software you have installed. With some models it is possible to exercise remote control of this firmware, and thus of the phone's computer, through the phone radio network." I think we need phones with free and open source GSM/UMTS aka Baseband stacks. One project helping with this is OsmocomBB http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/ http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/
- leoc 15y ago
  See also: UEFI.
russellallen 15y ago
The rise of Linux on the server and desktop was wonderful to watch and I find it depressing that increasingly it looks like a single moment in time, a 90s thing like John Perry Barlow and uncensored net feeds. And Richard is right - the real threat to open systems is not so much the obviously closed systems like Apple but the almost open systems like Android that are open enough to release the valve on community pressure but that aren't open enough to give us real freedom and control. On the plus side, things are still in flux. For example, Inferno is now available to run on top of the free Android Linux kernel: http://www.android-dev.ro/2011/09/17/hellaphone-inferno-os-for-android-phones-no-java-included/ http://www.android-dev.ro/2011/09/17/hellaphone-inferno-os-f...
- spot 15y ago
  > the real threat to open systems is not so much the obviously closed systems like Apple but the almost open systems like Android bullshit. this is factionalism and letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Tichy 15y ago
Are there Android phones with Android 3 (Honeycomb) yet? Because the article talks only about Honeycomb, so I think it is simply incorrect... As for locking the devices, unfortunately "free" also means that device vendors are free to lock the devices. If you care, don't get such a device (my philosophy: stick to the Nexus line to be safe).
- darklajid 15y ago
  No, locking down stuff like that is not 'freedom' in his (and mine) book. Locking down a device so that the _owner_ of said device cannot mess with it as he likes after paying you is not related to freedom. It removes freedom.
  - Tichy 15y ago
    Yes, but it is not Android doing the locking down, it is individual vendors. So Android is not to blame for that. Edit: so your complaint is that Android id not on the GPL? Or why the downvotes? Indeed, the GPL would be more free in a way, more restricted in another way.
    - pornel 15y ago
      > Indeed, the GPL would be more free in a way, more restricted in another way True, and RMS is concerned with freedom for end-users above freedom for phone vendors and network operators. GPL v3 with anti-tivoisation clauses seem to be exactly designed to disallow "malicious" firmware some Android phones have.
      - Tichy 15y ago
        Sure, but Google never claimed to be on the GPL.
0x12 15y ago
This thread has some people attacking RMS as a person without taking on the (guardian) article on its merits. Please read the article http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-fre..., the man raises some interesting points and is not just about your inability to inspect the source. The points that were specifically made (for those that want to rail against the article but that refuse to read it for some reason): - "Google's Andy Rubin put up a proof that Android was open, then subsequent releases of android were put out in a way that this proof no longer held, so by googles own definition android is currently not an open platform" - "Google has said it will never publish the source code of Android 3.0 (aside from Linux), even though executables have been released to the public. Android 3.1 source code is also being withheld. Thus, Android 3, apart from Linux, is non-free software, pure and simple." - "Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go. Even though the Android phones of today are considerably less bad than Apple or Windows smartphones, they cannot be said to respect your freedom." - "The phone network firmware comes pre-installed. If all it did was sit there and run, we could regard it as equivalent to a circuit. When we insist that the software in a computing device must be free, we can overlook pre-installed firmware that will never be upgraded, because it makes no difference to the user that it's a program rather than a circuit. Unfortunately, in this case it would be a malicious circuit. Malicious features are unacceptable no matter how they are implemented. On most Android phones, this firmware has so much control that it could turn the product into a listening device. On some, it controls the microphone. On some, it can take full control of the main computer, through shared memory, and can thus override or replace whatever free software you have installed. With some models it is possible to exercise remote control of this firmware, and thus of the phone's computer, through the phone radio network." Take issue with what the man said, not with the man. My personal take on all this is that if you base your offering on a huge amount of open source that you should keep the spirit of those whose code enables you to run your business alive and respond in kind.
- enjo 15y ago
  The 3.0 thing is a really interesting case. Android's open source model is that the code is primarily written and managed by Google, and then released all at once "when it's ready". So the only pushes are version releases and related bug-fixes. It was pretty clear that Google never considered Honeycomb to be "complete". It was pushed out in a hurry to deal with the fact that manufacturers were pushing out terrible experiences on tablets using older Android versions. Honeycomb is merely a stop-gap to the next version (the upcoming ice-cream sandwich). Google has been resistant to release the source precisely because I think they want to control (as much as possible) the proliferation of that code into devices that it can manage the bug fixing and release constraints on. That's why basically Google partners are the only ones with access to Honeycomb. If the new version is released and the source code isn't, then I think RMS has a point. Ice cream sandwich better be "complete" and see a commiserate source-code push to go along with it. If not, Android has lost it's open source credibility. I think it is too early to make that call, however. *disclaimer: I have no inside knowledge or any way to verify that my speculation is accurate:)
guelo 15y ago
My complete speculation as to why Honeycomb wasn't open sourced is Amazon. Amazon was forced to use an older Android for their tablet instead of being able to take advantage of Google's tablet work.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  And that's exactly the scenario Free Software and Open Source both targeted to avoid.
- beej71 15y ago
  So that it wouldn't compete with Google's non-existent tablet? There's something more here I don't know--deals Google has made with other vendors or somesuch...?
- bad_user 15y ago
  If Google didn't want for others to "take advantage" of its work, then they shouldn't have released Android as open-source in the first place. In spite of people telling that Android is closed because it has a closed development branch, the one thing that you can do with open-source is to fork it if you're not happy with the current status quo. But to fork Android 3.0 -- that's exactly what you cannot do. And that's definitely not open anymore. I'm doing some apps for Android currently. I'm only testing on Android 2.2 / 2.3 -- that's because if I wanted a closed platform, I would prefer iOS instead. When they'll release 3.x as open-source, then I'll be happy again.
spokengent 15y ago
I for one love not having my freedom respected. It means good products that work.
- danssig 15y ago
  Ah great, so you're an iPhone user to?
  - spokengent 15y ago
    No, I've had an iPhone, and had android phones. At the moment I mainly use android. My criteria for buying a phone does not feature "Does it respect my freedom". As usual Stallman is on a different planet to the rest of us, who just want shit to work. Does Stallman only buy socks as long as he has full manufacturing instructions included? If he buys a bowl, does he insist they include the mould used to create it, as well as all the paints, a DVD documenting how it was made etc. He's entertaining, but not much more than that.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      * the rest of us* Speak for yourself, not for everyone else. I rather have free even if it means less functional. And my socks or bowl doesn't have the ability to record my personal calls or track my location. Comparing the two is asinine.
      - w0utert 15y ago
        While I respect your opinion (everyone is entitled to have one), I hope you realize that it's not hard to come up with other examples of technology that is not 'open' in any way, yet could be used for malicious or undesirable purposes, right? I mean, I love open-source and everything, but I honestly don't give a sh_t whether the 'firmware' of the plane I'm flying, the playback device and amplifier pumping out my tunes, the microwave oven that heats my lasagna, the ECU controlling my cars engine or the software in my satnav system is 'open' and 'free'. All of those could have potential privacy or safety implications. For probably around 99.9% of all people using cell-phones, the exact same reasoning holds for how they think about them, and how they would prefer it to just work well and have more functionality, instead of carrying this (to them) abstract notion of being 'open'. If 'closed' means they get a better product (which is very often the case), then closed is better for them. Also, you are fooling yourself if you honestly believe that 'open' is a guarantee for 'safe', 'secure' or 'thrustworthy'. Open-source software has exploits and security holes just like proprietary software. Maybe less, but let's not pretend 'open' is equivalent to 'safe'. You can never be 100% sure the source code you are looking at is actually exactly the same as what is running on this piece of hardware you bought anyway, even though the manufacturer says so. I kind of agree with what spokengent said. FOSS has many advantages, but RMS is really taking things too far, as he has always done, pretending FOSS only has advantages and no downsides, and proprietary software is always bad and evil. He doesn't seem to understand there are many devices and applications that are simply incompatible with the FOSS way of doing things, for various reasons that have nothing to do with privacy, freedom or security. RMS is a FOSS absolutist, advocating FOSS like it's a religion, not a way of doing things that works really well for many things, but maybe not so well for others. Whether FOSS works well for cell-phones is up for debate, personally I don't really believe in it, and the way the Android ecosystem is developing and the strange sem-open development model behind is, is only confirming this, at least for now.
voidr 15y ago
Quotation taken out of context. The article reasonably explains it's point.
leppie 15y ago
I wonder how many bootloaders and recovery images (specifically the commercial ones) uses the Linux kernel for it?
5hoom 15y ago
Ahh, the second controversial Richard on HN today ;) Love him or hate him, Richard Stallman is nothing if not consistent. The fact is that he is right on this issue. At this time Honeycomb is not open source software. I'm a big fan of google, and as the story says Android is the best of a bad bunch (with regards to software freedom), but it's good that we have people like Stallman who can give us cause to stop & take a reality check (or unreality check, depending on your point of view...).
- notatoad 15y ago
  he's right, but in the wrong way. honeycomb is not open source software, but that does not mean that android is not open source software. honeycomb is a dead fork of the android project, it has no future. the android trunk is as open as it has ever been.
  - tadfisher 15y ago
    It is not as 'open' as most software projects. They develop in a closed environment and dump the results on the community. There are long-standing bugs that have been fixed in community distros such as Cyanogenmod, yet the Android team doesn't accept patches, because they're busy working on the next code dump. At Google, there is no 'upstream'.
    - notatoad 15y ago
      its not as open as community projects, but it is still open source. this is the sort of attitude that makes companies turn away from community development: the. sense of entitlement users get. they develop a great system, give it away for free, and publish the source. isn't that enough, do they really need to follow your preferred development pattern too? if you want to evangelize software freedom, how about commending Google for being as open as they are, and criticising the sellers of totally closed systems.
tarkin2 15y ago
I can understanding Google wanting control over who implements a not-quite-ready Android version. But, purely from a development perspective, if Ice-Cream Sandwich isn't fully OSS, it will decrease my enthusiasm for the platform enormously. One of my main reasons for investing time into Android is to eventually involve myself in the sources (and not just the Kernel sources), for fun, profit and security. If they take that away, they'd be little reason for choosing it over the iPhone.
flarg 15y ago
After years of reading Stallman haters and lovers I'm sorry to say that he is almost always right - good intentions never lead to good outcomes; only good actions from the outset. Google's failure to release the source for Android 3x maybe with good intentions, but it also pushes the envelope of what is acceptable for next time - which will probably be something like not releasing the source code for a year 'just to allow us to make some money'. Google effectively owns the internet for a lot of us, so they need to behave very very well - they need to do what Stallman says.
- ubernostrum 15y ago
  After years of reading Stallman haters and lovers I'm sorry to say that he is almost always right I frequently disagree with RMS' positions. Not because they're logically inconsistent, but because they're based on premises I don't accept. I think a lot of people are the same way; we can recognize an argument that "if you accept X, then Y", and say "OK, but I don't accept X". In this case I think he's reaching the same conclusion I would, but via a different route (albeit one with some of the same stops along the way). So in this case I'd agree with his conclusion.
jerrya 15y ago
All else being equal, Richard Stallman took a complex topic and made it very clear. Which I find very impressive and also helps in making his essay very persuasive. I wonder how long it took him to write and rewrite his essay.
mkup 15y ago
GPLv2 says: ----citation---- 2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change. b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.) These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program. In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License. ----end-of-citation---- We know that: 1. Android is a collective work based on Linux 2. Non-Linux part of Android is not distributed as a separate work in binary form. In binary form both parts of Android (Linux and non-Linux) are distributed together as a whole. 3. According to GPLv2, "when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it" So Google is clearly violating GPL here.
honza 15y ago
... well, but neither does Emacs.
known 15y ago
Open source promotes open competition. Commercial entities do not like competition.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
Why not link to the original source? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-fre...
rufibarbatus 15y ago
I. This is a case where Stallman pushes the notion that software freedom === individual freedom. This notion, while defensible, is not necessarily true, and so the assessment that Android phones can't be said to respect my freedom sounds wild and passionate but while being hardly informative. Freedom is one of those words which go deep with most people, but which for the same reason have come to mean a bunch of different, oft-contradictory things. (For some definition of freedom, the GPL can't be said to respect my freedom either.) II. The problem here is that Google had commited itself to releasing Android's source code. Withdrawing from it is exactly the same kind of thing as Sony's withdrawing multiboot from the PlayStation: they sold us something and now they're taking it away. In that sense is Android not respecting our freedom: some of us chose Android because of something that was being offered — something Google was commited to — and now that we've voluntarily locked ourselves into that platform, Google takes that decision factor away from us. Stallman has this weird ability to get cherry-picked for his most passionate quotes. Although I not always agree with him, it's important that we go a bit deeper and try to figure out his actual reasoning.
dspeyer 15y ago
Why is this being published now? Honeycomb was ages ago. Gingerbread (which is free) still dominates, and Ice Cream Sandwich (which will be free) will be out soon.
httpitis 15y ago
What would make Google release the source?
erikpukinskis 15y ago
At the risk of getting downvoted for being meta-, can I remind people that links like this need to be flagged? The Guidelines clearly state: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you see a link to a blog post like this, which is just a bad summary of an original source (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-fre...), please flag the summary link on HN, copy the URL of the original source, and paste it into the HN "submit" page (there's usually no need to fill in a title). That will automatically upvote the original source, giving it exposure and improving the quality of discussion. Obviously if the secondary source is an important editorial piece in it's own right, it's fine.
- chalst 15y ago
  ...which had an earlier HN story, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3013622 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3013622
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ShawnJG 15y ago
I am a bit disappointed that Google has seemingly reversed itself on its openness. While I would want someone poking around in code but I felt wasn't my best work, I feel that this excuse for Google is dubious at best. I believe it is done to stifle competition. They say they want to protect users experience, which you might be able to believe on face value if it weren't for the fact that anyone who had the skills to manipulate the code would inherently know that they are going to change the intended "Google experience". This is not something that a hacker would hold Google responsible for. If he actually could start the glass of milk you don't get mad at the cow because your milk is brown instead of white! Google is afraid that if they allow their code to be in the wild, hackers innovations will outstrip their own. They forgot what made their platform so attractive in the first place. Android OS benefited immensely the beginning from being open source people added features there were leaps and bounds ahead of Apple IOS. For people who are well-informed and made a comparison between the two a no-brainer. If they continue to do this it'll be like going to her door and closing it. And I will be their fault because I've been around long enough to know that there are infinite pathways innovations can take.

192 points by dkd903 15y ago

The original article by Stallman is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-fre...

rodh257 15y ago

We get it, this has been discussed over and over, Android 3.0 is not open source because the source was not released, can we move on now? Google will be releasing the source code to Ice Cream Sandwich, but for now, Android 3.0 is not open source. We didn't need Richard Stallman to tell us that.

vixen99 15y ago
In view of the ensuing discussion here, that may not be so. Beware the Royal 'we'. "It is also called the royal pronoun, the royal "we" or the Victorian "we." The more general word for the use of we to refer to oneself is nosism, from the Latin nos. It is most commonly used to denote the excellence, power, and dignity of the person that speaks or writes.:"
RexRollman 15y ago
So long as Google keeps referring to Android as open, I think the point needs to be brought up.

vegai 15y ago

Which ones do, I wonder?

biafra 15y ago
All those with a locked bootloader. BTW: Is there a complete list which ones have an unlocked or unlockable bootloader? I know about the following: - Android Dev Phone 1 (HTC Dream) - Ion (HTC Magic) - Motorola Droid (unfortunately not the Milestone) - Nexus One (HTC Passion) - Nexus S (relockable) (Samsung Crespo)
- josteink 15y ago
  Samsung Galaxy S 1 & 2 (international versions).
- vegardx 15y ago
  I think we're moving towards unlocked phones. Both HTC and Samsung have sent signals that they want to open up their phones. And then we're talking about drivers and specifications. Everything that can get them one step ahead of Apple. Also, it seem to be deemed "cool" to be open, so they might just spin it to marketing. Sadly I don't know if this will be the case for US, where the operators have way too much control over the devices. Luckily I live in Europe, outside of EU. :-)

danielhunt 15y ago

...Do Not Respect Your Software Freedom. Note that (pretty important) word left out there? Yeah. Linkbait.

angrycoder 15y ago
Its Richard Stallman, did you really think the article was going to be about your freedom to eat tacos?
hetman 15y ago
Could you define freedom?

outside1234 15y ago

i want to like rms but you get the sense that he doesn't live in the real world whenever you read his stuff. I mean, seriously, Android is about a lightyear more open than iOS and there are super good reasons Honeycomb is not out. An OEM in China would promptly put out some sort of crappy phone that uses it and wrecks the Android brand.

lurker19 15y ago
What has RMS written that is not real? He knows that some non-free software is compelling and profitable, but he argues that in the long run of is unstainable. And when you look at Lion and Metro and Google Apps' only half-baked Data Liberation Front and compare to what RMS wrote 20 years ago, it is clear he is very much in the real world, unfortunately. Is Android the least evil? Probably. But it is still not free. And RMS doesn't say you mustn't Android and whatever else; he just days that you shouldn't if you want to protect and promote software freedom, and he is a living model of an example free software lifestyle, for better or worse.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  he just days that you shouldn't if you want to protect and promote software freedom So what phone do I use then? There's a couple select phones that might qualify, but they are fringe, expensive and impractical. This is what your parent is referring to. When people talk about how rms doesn't "live in the real world" they are coming from a "people who, at the end of the day, have to get sh*t done" point of view. Both viewpoints have their merits.
0x12 15y ago
> An OEM in China would promptly put out some sort of crappy phone that uses it and wrecks the Android brand. They're totally free to do that right now, they don't need a more open version of android for that. It's not as if google is limiting who has or does not have access to the platform. The issue that RMS is trying to address is one that matters to a small subset of those that buy the phones, your ability to modify the code and improve it. The price of the lowest end android smartphones is dropping so fast there won't be any room left at the bottom for a hypothetical even lower end phone. As for android being 'more open than ios' RMS makes that point in the article.

bleakgadfly 15y ago

If we'd follow everything Stallman said we'd all be "surfing the web" one email at a time (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134336/focus=134979 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134336/focus=1...)

lurker19 15y ago
Are you trying to discredit him by making fun of the way he organizes his reading to optimize his productive time and spotty Internet connectivity when traveling? Instapaper, much beloved in these parts, is a fancy modern take on the same idea as RMS's web-to-email system.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- wmf 15y ago
  Or you could see it as a symptom of how much RMS has isolated himself from the world and how that hurts his campaign. Years after AJAX had become boring, RMS finally discovered that JavaScript exists and wrote a rant about how evil it is. When someone suggested that Emacs switch to Git, RMS basically said "I'm not going to read any Git documentation, someone please explain it to me". I wouldn't be surprised if he discovered the whole Honeycomb debate just in time for it to be over. The world is moving on and he's paying no attention.
Marwy 15y ago
He states that he does this for personal reasons. To me it sounds like: "I know it's slow, but I don't want to waste my time sitting on HN all day long, so I'll just download what I need to".

jarin 15y ago

Stallman never misses an opportunity to bring up the Linux vs. GNU/Linux distinction.

arkx 15y ago
Carthago delenda est.

biafra 15y ago

I think Stallman raises some interesting and valid points (in his article in the guardian. It is worth reading it to the end). For example this: "On most Android phones, this firmware has so much control that it could turn the product into a listening device. On some, it controls the microphone. On some, it can take full control of the main computer, through shared memory, and can thus override or replace whatever free software you have installed. With some models it is possible to exercise remote control of this firmware, and thus of the phone's computer, through the phone radio network." I think we need phones with free and open source GSM/UMTS aka Baseband stacks. One project helping with this is OsmocomBB http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/ http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/

leoc 15y ago
See also: UEFI.

russellallen 15y ago

The rise of Linux on the server and desktop was wonderful to watch and I find it depressing that increasingly it looks like a single moment in time, a 90s thing like John Perry Barlow and uncensored net feeds. And Richard is right - the real threat to open systems is not so much the obviously closed systems like Apple but the almost open systems like Android that are open enough to release the valve on community pressure but that aren't open enough to give us real freedom and control. On the plus side, things are still in flux. For example, Inferno is now available to run on top of the free Android Linux kernel: http://www.android-dev.ro/2011/09/17/hellaphone-inferno-os-for-android-phones-no-java-included/ http://www.android-dev.ro/2011/09/17/hellaphone-inferno-os-f...

spot 15y ago
> the real threat to open systems is not so much the obviously closed systems like Apple but the almost open systems like Android bullshit. this is factionalism and letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Tichy 15y ago

Are there Android phones with Android 3 (Honeycomb) yet? Because the article talks only about Honeycomb, so I think it is simply incorrect... As for locking the devices, unfortunately "free" also means that device vendors are free to lock the devices. If you care, don't get such a device (my philosophy: stick to the Nexus line to be safe).

darklajid 15y ago
No, locking down stuff like that is not 'freedom' in his (and mine) book. Locking down a device so that the _owner_ of said device cannot mess with it as he likes after paying you is not related to freedom. It removes freedom.
- Tichy 15y ago
  Yes, but it is not Android doing the locking down, it is individual vendors. So Android is not to blame for that. Edit: so your complaint is that Android id not on the GPL? Or why the downvotes? Indeed, the GPL would be more free in a way, more restricted in another way.
  - pornel 15y ago
    > Indeed, the GPL would be more free in a way, more restricted in another way True, and RMS is concerned with freedom for end-users above freedom for phone vendors and network operators. GPL v3 with anti-tivoisation clauses seem to be exactly designed to disallow "malicious" firmware some Android phones have.
    - Tichy 15y ago
      Sure, but Google never claimed to be on the GPL.

0x12 15y ago

This thread has some people attacking RMS as a person without taking on the (guardian) article on its merits. Please read the article http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-fre..., the man raises some interesting points and is not just about your inability to inspect the source. The points that were specifically made (for those that want to rail against the article but that refuse to read it for some reason): - "Google's Andy Rubin put up a proof that Android was open, then subsequent releases of android were put out in a way that this proof no longer held, so by googles own definition android is currently not an open platform" - "Google has said it will never publish the source code of Android 3.0 (aside from Linux), even though executables have been released to the public. Android 3.1 source code is also being withheld. Thus, Android 3, apart from Linux, is non-free software, pure and simple." - "Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go. Even though the Android phones of today are considerably less bad than Apple or Windows smartphones, they cannot be said to respect your freedom." - "The phone network firmware comes pre-installed. If all it did was sit there and run, we could regard it as equivalent to a circuit. When we insist that the software in a computing device must be free, we can overlook pre-installed firmware that will never be upgraded, because it makes no difference to the user that it's a program rather than a circuit. Unfortunately, in this case it would be a malicious circuit. Malicious features are unacceptable no matter how they are implemented. On most Android phones, this firmware has so much control that it could turn the product into a listening device. On some, it controls the microphone. On some, it can take full control of the main computer, through shared memory, and can thus override or replace whatever free software you have installed. With some models it is possible to exercise remote control of this firmware, and thus of the phone's computer, through the phone radio network." Take issue with what the man said, not with the man. My personal take on all this is that if you base your offering on a huge amount of open source that you should keep the spirit of those whose code enables you to run your business alive and respond in kind.

enjo 15y ago
The 3.0 thing is a really interesting case. Android's open source model is that the code is primarily written and managed by Google, and then released all at once "when it's ready". So the only pushes are version releases and related bug-fixes. It was pretty clear that Google never considered Honeycomb to be "complete". It was pushed out in a hurry to deal with the fact that manufacturers were pushing out terrible experiences on tablets using older Android versions. Honeycomb is merely a stop-gap to the next version (the upcoming ice-cream sandwich). Google has been resistant to release the source precisely because I think they want to control (as much as possible) the proliferation of that code into devices that it can manage the bug fixing and release constraints on. That's why basically Google partners are the only ones with access to Honeycomb. If the new version is released and the source code isn't, then I think RMS has a point. Ice cream sandwich better be "complete" and see a commiserate source-code push to go along with it. If not, Android has lost it's open source credibility. I think it is too early to make that call, however. *disclaimer: I have no inside knowledge or any way to verify that my speculation is accurate:)

guelo 15y ago

My complete speculation as to why Honeycomb wasn't open sourced is Amazon. Amazon was forced to use an older Android for their tablet instead of being able to take advantage of Google's tablet work.

guard-of-terra 15y ago
And that's exactly the scenario Free Software and Open Source both targeted to avoid.
beej71 15y ago
So that it wouldn't compete with Google's non-existent tablet? There's something more here I don't know--deals Google has made with other vendors or somesuch...?
bad_user 15y ago
If Google didn't want for others to "take advantage" of its work, then they shouldn't have released Android as open-source in the first place. In spite of people telling that Android is closed because it has a closed development branch, the one thing that you can do with open-source is to fork it if you're not happy with the current status quo. But to fork Android 3.0 -- that's exactly what you cannot do. And that's definitely not open anymore. I'm doing some apps for Android currently. I'm only testing on Android 2.2 / 2.3 -- that's because if I wanted a closed platform, I would prefer iOS instead. When they'll release 3.x as open-source, then I'll be happy again.

spokengent 15y ago

I for one love not having my freedom respected. It means good products that work.

danssig 15y ago
Ah great, so you're an iPhone user to?
- spokengent 15y ago
  No, I've had an iPhone, and had android phones. At the moment I mainly use android. My criteria for buying a phone does not feature "Does it respect my freedom". As usual Stallman is on a different planet to the rest of us, who just want shit to work. Does Stallman only buy socks as long as he has full manufacturing instructions included? If he buys a bowl, does he insist they include the mould used to create it, as well as all the paints, a DVD documenting how it was made etc. He's entertaining, but not much more than that.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    * the rest of us* Speak for yourself, not for everyone else. I rather have free even if it means less functional. And my socks or bowl doesn't have the ability to record my personal calls or track my location. Comparing the two is asinine.
    - w0utert 15y ago
      While I respect your opinion (everyone is entitled to have one), I hope you realize that it's not hard to come up with other examples of technology that is not 'open' in any way, yet could be used for malicious or undesirable purposes, right? I mean, I love open-source and everything, but I honestly don't give a sh_t whether the 'firmware' of the plane I'm flying, the playback device and amplifier pumping out my tunes, the microwave oven that heats my lasagna, the ECU controlling my cars engine or the software in my satnav system is 'open' and 'free'. All of those could have potential privacy or safety implications. For probably around 99.9% of all people using cell-phones, the exact same reasoning holds for how they think about them, and how they would prefer it to just work well and have more functionality, instead of carrying this (to them) abstract notion of being 'open'. If 'closed' means they get a better product (which is very often the case), then closed is better for them. Also, you are fooling yourself if you honestly believe that 'open' is a guarantee for 'safe', 'secure' or 'thrustworthy'. Open-source software has exploits and security holes just like proprietary software. Maybe less, but let's not pretend 'open' is equivalent to 'safe'. You can never be 100% sure the source code you are looking at is actually exactly the same as what is running on this piece of hardware you bought anyway, even though the manufacturer says so. I kind of agree with what spokengent said. FOSS has many advantages, but RMS is really taking things too far, as he has always done, pretending FOSS only has advantages and no downsides, and proprietary software is always bad and evil. He doesn't seem to understand there are many devices and applications that are simply incompatible with the FOSS way of doing things, for various reasons that have nothing to do with privacy, freedom or security. RMS is a FOSS absolutist, advocating FOSS like it's a religion, not a way of doing things that works really well for many things, but maybe not so well for others. Whether FOSS works well for cell-phones is up for debate, personally I don't really believe in it, and the way the Android ecosystem is developing and the strange sem-open development model behind is, is only confirming this, at least for now.

voidr 15y ago

Quotation taken out of context. The article reasonably explains it's point.

leppie 15y ago

I wonder how many bootloaders and recovery images (specifically the commercial ones) uses the Linux kernel for it?

5hoom 15y ago

Ahh, the second controversial Richard on HN today ;) Love him or hate him, Richard Stallman is nothing if not consistent. The fact is that he is right on this issue. At this time Honeycomb is not open source software. I'm a big fan of google, and as the story says Android is the best of a bad bunch (with regards to software freedom), but it's good that we have people like Stallman who can give us cause to stop & take a reality check (or unreality check, depending on your point of view...).

notatoad 15y ago
he's right, but in the wrong way. honeycomb is not open source software, but that does not mean that android is not open source software. honeycomb is a dead fork of the android project, it has no future. the android trunk is as open as it has ever been.
- tadfisher 15y ago
  It is not as 'open' as most software projects. They develop in a closed environment and dump the results on the community. There are long-standing bugs that have been fixed in community distros such as Cyanogenmod, yet the Android team doesn't accept patches, because they're busy working on the next code dump. At Google, there is no 'upstream'.
  - notatoad 15y ago
    its not as open as community projects, but it is still open source. this is the sort of attitude that makes companies turn away from community development: the. sense of entitlement users get. they develop a great system, give it away for free, and publish the source. isn't that enough, do they really need to follow your preferred development pattern too? if you want to evangelize software freedom, how about commending Google for being as open as they are, and criticising the sellers of totally closed systems.

tarkin2 15y ago

I can understanding Google wanting control over who implements a not-quite-ready Android version. But, purely from a development perspective, if Ice-Cream Sandwich isn't fully OSS, it will decrease my enthusiasm for the platform enormously. One of my main reasons for investing time into Android is to eventually involve myself in the sources (and not just the Kernel sources), for fun, profit and security. If they take that away, they'd be little reason for choosing it over the iPhone.

flarg 15y ago

After years of reading Stallman haters and lovers I'm sorry to say that he is almost always right - good intentions never lead to good outcomes; only good actions from the outset. Google's failure to release the source for Android 3x maybe with good intentions, but it also pushes the envelope of what is acceptable for next time - which will probably be something like not releasing the source code for a year 'just to allow us to make some money'. Google effectively owns the internet for a lot of us, so they need to behave very very well - they need to do what Stallman says.

ubernostrum 15y ago
After years of reading Stallman haters and lovers I'm sorry to say that he is almost always right I frequently disagree with RMS' positions. Not because they're logically inconsistent, but because they're based on premises I don't accept. I think a lot of people are the same way; we can recognize an argument that "if you accept X, then Y", and say "OK, but I don't accept X". In this case I think he's reaching the same conclusion I would, but via a different route (albeit one with some of the same stops along the way). So in this case I'd agree with his conclusion.

jerrya 15y ago

All else being equal, Richard Stallman took a complex topic and made it very clear. Which I find very impressive and also helps in making his essay very persuasive. I wonder how long it took him to write and rewrite his essay.

mkup 15y ago

GPLv2 says: ----citation---- 2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change. b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.) These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program. In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License. ----end-of-citation---- We know that: 1. Android is a collective work based on Linux 2. Non-Linux part of Android is not distributed as a separate work in binary form. In binary form both parts of Android (Linux and non-Linux) are distributed together as a whole. 3. According to GPLv2, "when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it" So Google is clearly violating GPL here.

honza 15y ago

... well, but neither does Emacs.

known 15y ago

Open source promotes open competition. Commercial entities do not like competition.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

Why not link to the original source? http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-fre...

rufibarbatus 15y ago

I. This is a case where Stallman pushes the notion that software freedom === individual freedom. This notion, while defensible, is not necessarily true, and so the assessment that Android phones can't be said to respect my freedom sounds wild and passionate but while being hardly informative. Freedom is one of those words which go deep with most people, but which for the same reason have come to mean a bunch of different, oft-contradictory things. (For some definition of freedom, the GPL can't be said to respect my freedom either.) II. The problem here is that Google had commited itself to releasing Android's source code. Withdrawing from it is exactly the same kind of thing as Sony's withdrawing multiboot from the PlayStation: they sold us something and now they're taking it away. In that sense is Android not respecting our freedom: some of us chose Android because of something that was being offered — something Google was commited to — and now that we've voluntarily locked ourselves into that platform, Google takes that decision factor away from us. Stallman has this weird ability to get cherry-picked for his most passionate quotes. Although I not always agree with him, it's important that we go a bit deeper and try to figure out his actual reasoning.

dspeyer 15y ago

Why is this being published now? Honeycomb was ages ago. Gingerbread (which is free) still dominates, and Ice Cream Sandwich (which will be free) will be out soon.

httpitis 15y ago

What would make Google release the source?

erikpukinskis 15y ago

At the risk of getting downvoted for being meta-, can I remind people that links like this need to be flagged? The Guidelines clearly state: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter." - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you see a link to a blog post like this, which is just a bad summary of an original source (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-free-software-stallman http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/19/android-fre...), please flag the summary link on HN, copy the URL of the original source, and paste it into the HN "submit" page (there's usually no need to fill in a title). That will automatically upvote the original source, giving it exposure and improving the quality of discussion. Obviously if the secondary source is an important editorial piece in it's own right, it's fine.

chalst 15y ago
...which had an earlier HN story, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3013622 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3013622

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ShawnJG 15y ago

I am a bit disappointed that Google has seemingly reversed itself on its openness. While I would want someone poking around in code but I felt wasn't my best work, I feel that this excuse for Google is dubious at best. I believe it is done to stifle competition. They say they want to protect users experience, which you might be able to believe on face value if it weren't for the fact that anyone who had the skills to manipulate the code would inherently know that they are going to change the intended "Google experience". This is not something that a hacker would hold Google responsible for. If he actually could start the glass of milk you don't get mad at the cow because your milk is brown instead of white! Google is afraid that if they allow their code to be in the wild, hackers innovations will outstrip their own. They forgot what made their platform so attractive in the first place. Android OS benefited immensely the beginning from being open source people added features there were leaps and bounds ahead of Apple IOS. For people who are well-informed and made a comparison between the two a no-brainer. If they continue to do this it'll be like going to her door and closing it. And I will be their fault because I've been around long enough to know that there are infinite pathways innovations can take.