These are the slides of my talk at FrOSCon 2011:
"Innovation especially in the mobile market is currently driven by mostly proprietary technology. Not only Apple with its iOS and accompanying products but also Google with its behind-closed-doors development approach towards Android are threatening approaches which foster open development processes. Which technologies and business models can survive in such an environment?
This talk will give an overview on the current Open Source and Free Software commitments of companies driving the mobile market. I will give insights into how much Android is actually free in GNU's sense of freedom and cover the potential of driving forces of the mobile evolution such as app stores to foster free access to data, code and people."
9. Operating system
●Completely proprietary (besides some parts)
●That's it
10. Dev tools
●iOS SDK: Developer program fee ($99/year)
●Xcode (Objective-C)
●Mac only
11. Apps/Ecosystem
●Only on Apple's App Store
●Not GPL-compatible („Usage Rules“)
●The Usage Rules are very scary for every Free
Software developer
●Open Source software exists nevertheless
12. Apps/Ecosystem
Fun fact: The Developer Program license
agreement does explicitely forbid you to
use the location services API for fleet
management.
13.
14. Operating system
●First proprietary, then open, then proprietary
again
Source code not available
●
No political backing by Nokia anymore
●
17. Operating system
How many points out of 100 do you
think Android would score in a test
auditing its openness?
18. Operating system
●Most parts licensed under GPL (Linux), LGPL
(WebKit) and Apache License (Android specific
components)
Trademark owned by Google
●
Source code released „at will“ by Google
●
Officially maintained by Open Handset
●
Alliance which is not a legal entity
19. Operating system
Development behind closed doors
●
●Linux kernel forked without merging back
(who's to blame here?)
●There exists a Contributor Agreement though
it is highly unlikely that many 3rd party
contributors exist
Very good documentation
●
No public Roadmap
●
Closed apps like Gmail and Market
●
20. Operating system
Fun fact: Android scored 23 out of 100
points in the Open Governance Index
http://www.visionmobile.com/research.php#OGI
21. Dev tools
●SDK: Can be freely downloaded, source in
repo only
●Win, Mac, Linux
●ADT plugin for Eclipse
●NDK: For C or C++ development
22. Apps/Ecosystem
●Android Market: central app repo
●Installation of apps directly is possible (easily)
●Market is GPL-compatible
23. Vendor ecosystem
●HTC: Sense UI is now (probably) open source
●Motorola: Proudly presented by Google
Samsung: Unlocked bootloaders? Hired
●
Cyanogen
==> All in all, vendors have not much to say