This is quite unfair. Android has had a huge impact on the phone market in terms of openness, for manufacturers as well as for end users. I took advantage of t

This is quite unfair. Android has had a huge impact on the phone market in terms of openness, for manufacturers as well as for end users. I took advantage of this when I put CyanogenMod on my phone using the unlocking tool provided by HTC. I didn't even think of doing something like that with my pre-Android phones. If you choose to buy a locked-down Android device, blame yourself and then blame Linus: he's the one strongly objecting to distributing Linux under the GPLv3 license, because he dislikes the very clause that would guarantee your freedom to tinker with you device's kernel. But even if every Android was as closed as a TiVo box, it would still be an open-source victory. It would just be a victory more relevant to the manufacturers world than to the users world. Chrome OS device are similarly hackable, each Chromebook having a switch to turn on Developer Mode. I took advantage of this to run a Debian chroot in my Chromebook's linux system. More generally, I find it ironic that people complain about Android and Chrome OS not being "real Linux". For years we have had flame wars about Linux vs GNU/Linux terminology, and now people say that Androids and Chromebooks don't really run Linux because they are not anything like a GNU environment. Turns out the Linux vs GNU/Linux distinction is actually useful.