On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Vinayak Hegde <vinay...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Upstream... huh? Expand please? -Tim > > Harald Welte (netfilter hacker) had linked to a good presentation > called "Android Mythbusters"[1] sometime back. Not sure if the issues > mentioned have changed since then. > > -- Vinayak > 1. http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2009/11/04/ So, he disagrees with the way the Android flavor of Linux is structured and says "I can't wait until somebody rips it apart and replaces the system layer with a standard GNU/Linux distribution with Dalvik ". Because it's GPL'ed free software, the Android people can give the strategy that he disagrees with a try, and because it's GPL'ed free software, Harald is free to try to do exactly what he proposes, not just hope someone else does. (Well, actually, the Android parts are Apache license not GPL, but he's still free to do that). It seems to me clearly outside the spirit of FLOSS to sneer at someone else's distro just because it's different. Android devices are currently in more pockets than the sum total of all previous efforts to make Linux usefully portable, so one could argue that the evidence isn't on Harald's side. Do we know *why* the Android people did these in-his-view horrible things? Actually, I don't either. But it sure is nice to have a polished commercial phone in my pocket that I can run a shell on. -T
