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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
by 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 agohe'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 agoIt 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 agoits 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.