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Comment by notorandit

7 days ago

We ("you") have no power to keep android open. Unfortunately it is in the hands of a company that is building it for profit, in a way or the other.

It's been our choice to drink this glass of wishful thinking while giving that company a solid dominant position in the market.

We ("you") can only make choices that will overturn that trend.

Fully opensource hardware with fully opensource software? Maybe, but also this is wishful thinking.

16 comments

notorandit

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phoronixrly  7 days ago

We (people who live in a country/confederacy with working antitrust laws) have power to keep large companies from anticompetitive practices such as this one.

  • pessimizer  6 days ago

    What country does this "we" that you speak of live in? In the US there hasn't been any antitrust enforcement for 30 years (really more like 50 years, but I'm being generous), Obama appointed a crop of judges that don't even believe in antitrust as a concept, and Congress doesn't do anything that hasn't been paid for by a donor any more.

    I haven't heard about any other countries doing any better, either. Their systems were even cheaper to subvert.

sigmoid10  7 days ago

It's also heavily influenced by businesses. Most employers will happily hand you an Apple or Android phone for work, but I don't think there is a single company out there that would dare to hand normal people an Ubuntu Touch based phone.

fsflover  6 days ago

> Fully opensource hardware with fully opensource software? Maybe, but also this is wishful thinking.

My smartphone runs an FSF-endorsed OS, PureOS. This is reality. It's not open hardware, but it's a long way from Android in the right direction. You can also get a Precursor, which is open hardware.

  • direwolf20  6 days ago

    A Precursor costs about 1000$ and only does cryptography, not Flappy Bird. Most of these supposedly open alternatives make no economic sense.

    • notorandit  6 days ago

      It does instead, imho. Commercial phone cost also includes the data value it steals continuously.

colordrops  7 days ago

If they close things up with no alternative, the free open source software will likely start to catch up. it will take a few years though. This could be a blessing in disguise.

  • RussianCow  7 days ago

    There is just no reasonable way that the open source community can compete with a $3.8T company. And before you say something along the lines of, "But they don't need to compete, they just need to be good enough", that still requires business to put their apps on some open source app store and make them compatible with the open source OS, and there is close to zero incentive for them to do so.