Comment by icebraining
11 years ago
Are you serious? What other commercial OS can I do a competing fork of? Don't you see that the same restrictions apply to all other consumer OSs (iOS, WP, etc) by simply being closed-source?
11 years ago
Are you serious? What other commercial OS can I do a competing fork of? Don't you see that the same restrictions apply to all other consumer OSs (iOS, WP, etc) by simply being closed-source?
That's a fair point, but Android is open source (and indeed was heavily marketed on that basis). They don't get to use any mechanism they like to make the situation comparable to their closed competitors. Their situation is also not comparable to iOS, WP, etc, because of their position of market dominance, just the same as the situation with Windows and Mac OS back in the day.
That's a fair point, but Android is open source (and indeed was heavily marketed on that basis). They don't get to use any mechanism they like to make the situation comparable to their closed competitors.
Android is open source; their services and corresponding apps aren't, and that's what they use as leverage. Not allowing them the same rights over those as other companies have over their proprietary software is essentially punishing them for having released something as open source.
And yes, Android is open source, and the Kindle Fire proves it. The fact that some people expect Google Play et all to be bundled is not Google's fault.
Their situation is also not comparable to iOS, WP, etc, because of their position of market dominance, just the same as the situation with Windows and Mac OS back in the day.
But Windows was, and while Microsoft was criticized for a lot of anticompetitive plays, not allowing people to create forks of Windows was never one of them. Not to mention that Google does allow you to create forks of Android, they just don't give you access to their services on top of that.