As I said, it’s about rights. Whether you choose to exercise those rights doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have those rights.

As to whether you decide to use Free Software or not, that’s your choice. No one is forcing you to. No one is forcing you not to. It’s a choice.

As to Google, I suspect that they may find that they are going to get more than they bargained for…

In 2005, I bought my first Mac because a work colleague mentioned that since I liked UNIX/Linux I should take a look at a Mac. He let me borrow his Mac mini for a few days. I bought one a few weeks later. In 2009, I ejected the last non-Mac/OS X computer from my home.

I don’t care that I don’t have the right to compile my software. Most of us “normal” human being don’t care either and lack the skills to do so. I’ll take the compiled OS and software thank you.

The only people who care whether their software is FOSS or proprietary are the geeks. Everyone else just wants to surf the web, check email, balance the checkbook, edit vacation videos and photos, and get business done.

Android’s openness has nothing to do with “better”. It has to do with Google needing to attract hardware manufacturers so that they could jump start their “mobile advertising eco-system”. I’ll believe the Android hype when I can be assured that ANY app I buy to run on one Android phone will run on ANY other Android phone.

Khürt Williams

But the “the ideologue freetards” do not mean free as in “free beer” or “free lunch” they mean free(dom) as in speech or rights. The challenge I have with all that “you can use the code and look at it” arguments is that like most people, I have neither the time nor the incliniation to look at the code and change it to my needs. I have no intention of becoming an expert on internal combustion engines just so that I can get to work and I suspect most people are the same way. When I do use “free” software I use it because it is “econonically free”. That’s not a business model. That’s a political model.

Khürt, You don’t get it, do you? For all Daniel argues against “FREE” he understands it. No one cares if you compile it yourself, or if I compile it for you. What matters is that you have the right to do so.

You may not benefit directly from free software, but indirectly you do. If you bought a netbook recently, its low price is due to competition from free software. If you bought an Apple computer, it is due to FreeBSD guys giving the kernel for free. I used MacOS 8 for a brief while in 1997 and it crashed more often than Windows did back then. It was a horrible piece of crap.
The internet you are using every day is due to free software. So, the benefits to you are immense, it is just that they are not immediately apparent.

[Just to add some accuracy, while Mac OS X incorporates lots of FreeBSD and other FOSS code into its kernel and Unix subsystem, it does not use the FreeBSD kernel itself, and Apple has done huge amounts of work to develop its own Darwin kernel (based on Mach and BSD sources) in a unique branch of the Unix kernel family tree. - Dan ]

The thing is, free software is not directed at end users. It is directed at developers, who have the necessary tools to produce something good and offer it to end users. The result may not be free as in beer, but it gives the required substrate for companies like Apple to build good things upon it.

You guys miss one important point. It is like arguing that tyranny is better than democracy because it allows for security. Well, some people prefer freedom to security.

[True, but most people also prefer centrist-style security than teabagger anarchy. There is not a binary choice between "tyranny" and "ideologically pure freedom." Actually, the closer one gets to the extreme fringe in opinion, the more they have in common with the fringe on the other extreme of the spectrum. Which is why I like the middle: you get hate from both sides, but they largely cancel each other out. - Dan ]

Daniel, you seem to argue the benefits of a centralized vendor over a bunch of competing vendors. Well, Android is not at fault here – it just enables those competing vendors to compete better against each other and against Apple, by offering a customizable platform that Microsoft failed to provide. If the whole idea is wrong, well you argued it before, that a focused hardware maker is better at providing a polished and useful thing than a bunch of competing rivals, but nothing stops one of them to focus on quality and polish and compete directly with Apple. The fact that it has not happened yet probably means that Apple is unique in its attention to user demands, but it could still happen.

[I'm not arguing for a world dominated by Apple (the late 80s were no paradise); I'm arguing that competition is not achieved by having one monopoly in software. I'm happy to see multiple competitors (Symbian, RIM, Apple, Android, WebOS, WiMo, plus new independent entries) and multiple hardware makers. It gives me more to write about. - Dan]

You also argue that the customization options of Android are bad. But that is exactly what allows device manufacturers to differentiate between themselves and offer better interfaces due to resulting competition. This is what WinMo sorely lacked.

Another point you did not mention is FireFox took 5 years to re-write the old Netscape code to come with something useful. Imagine how long it will take for open source people of Symbian to re-write all that code they got.

[Netscape was almost completely worthless by 2000. Symbian has a polished kernel and Nokia's s60 is functional. There's a ton of people who know how to code for Symbian, even if its not exactly pleasant. You seem to be arguing that Linux will trump Windows Vista because there's issues with Vista. Well, in this case, Vista (Symbian, obviously) is being open sourced and given away for free. Which makes it harder to argue that another Linux distro is going to spectacularly change things. Keep in mind that Android is just trying to be a free WiMo that sort of clones elements of everything. It isn't really cohesive or original, and it doesn't have a single party pushing it. It has, as you describe, lots of squabbling hardware vendors trying to steal it and run in their own direction. When has this worked in the past? - Dan ]