Comment by apetrovic
11 years ago
> Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem.
Imagine you want to sell a Linux laptop with your own Linux distribution. You're just a small shop in California, and you're shopping around to find a manufacturer for your laptops. And you find that anyone connected to Microsoft (Foxconn, Asus, Acer, Gigabyte, etc) can't do any job with you. Would you say "that's fair, Microsoft isn't evil by forcing hardware manufacturers to work exclusively with them" in such situation?
That's not what they're doing. HTC, Samsung, etc still sell non-Google OSs, like Windows Phone and Bada.
A good analogy would be Microsoft preventing you from selling your fork of Windows on those manufacturers, which happens to be exactly what every big OS maker does, by simply not distributing it under a Free license.