Truly Free phones?

[Joseph Sinclair]

Ryan Rix wrote:
> Not top posting cause Tuna is mean :P
> 
> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Joseph Sinclair <plug-discussion at stcaz.net
>> wrote:
> 
>> While Google (and others) develop the Android O/S, the carriers make all
>> the decisions about how open the phone is.  The G1 is a *T-Mobile* phone,
>> not a Google Phone.
> 
> Amen, brother. :)
> 
> 
>>  Because Android is mostly Apache licensed, the carriers are free to modify
>> it however they like for "their" phones, and they do exactly that.
> 
> This is why the GPL was written as opposed to the APL or MPL or BSD
> license... WHY aren't these things under the GPL??
---
Google made a conscious choice to use the Apache license (or BSD) wherever possible to make the O/S more "carrier friendly", unfortunately that makes it less free in some ways.  They even added a user-space driver interface so Carriers could add non-free drivers for "their" hardware without having to deal with GPL issues.
I'm told that the carriers flat refused to consider any O/S they couldn't lock/customize/proprietize, but I can't say how accurate that might be.

> 
> 
>> The T-Mobile G1, like any other T-Mobile Phone, is a locked phone, and you
>> can only run the apps that T-Mobile permits.  Google wrote the software
>> open-source, but T-Mobile locked down the phone environment.
>>
> 
> If I were to purchase a G1 from the manufacture or "unlocked" from eBay,
> craigslist, could it run with a T-Mobile SIM card? Can I reflash it to get
> rid of this limitation with it still "working?"
---
I haven't heard of any way to get a fully unlocked G1 phone running on T-Mobile with your own flash of the firmware, but others claim that's possible.
I'd say some research is in order.

You can certainly add your own Android applications (written in Java for Dalvik), but adding any non-Java code (or accessing network resources) depends on how the carrier chooses to interact with the phone and what rules they have in place.

> 
> 
>> Even the Freerunner is difficult to get service with in the US, our
>> carriers mostly still have Ma-Bell Monopoly envy, and want to lock you into
>> their network so they don't have to actually compete.
> 
> 
> Tuna: What carrier are you on with your Freerunner?
> 
> 
>>
>> There are supposed to be several more Android-based phones (and a couple
>> netbooks) released in the next 3-6 months, so if you can wait a little bit,
>> that might be good.
>>
>> You can develop for the Android environment without a phone using the
>> development SDK, it's a qemu-based virtual machine, so it works just like a
>> real phone from a development perspective.
>>
> Doesn't really do me any good though without a phone ;)
---
You can begin developing software to accomplish your chosen task without hardware, then polish it up when you have hardware you can use...

> 
> 
>> Android applications are Java applications written for the Dalvik
>> environment.  While it's possible to write a Python app for Android, you'll
>> find it extremely hard to get it on the phone (you have to create a custom
>> build of the O/S and reflash the phone), and your battery life will likely
>> suffer greatly due to Python's higher overhead compared to Dalvik.
>> The better approach in this case would be to write the code that will run
>> in the phone in Java (standard Java 5), because the Dalvik environment (and
>> it's unusual lifecycle management) is needed to maintain good battery life
>> when apps are running.  You can still write the netbook code in Python, or
>> you can use Java there as well.
> 
> I just provided Python as an example. Is there any native framework for the
> OS?
---
Java is basically the "native" language for Android.  Everything you see, including the home screen, on the phone is in Java.
If you download the SDK you'll see in the documentation and examples how the system manages Java code to ensure it's efficient with battery and maintains a responsive UI.

> 
> 
> Why hasn't the FSF done anything about this as much as cell phones are a
> part of this culture?
> 
---
Dennis would know more on this, but I believe the FSF is doing what they can.  The carriers are trying desperately to stem the tide and avoid becoming "dumb pipes", even though that's exactly what their customers want them to be.  Given how heavily regulated that industry is, it may require regulatory intervention to force the first carrier to open up and accept the inevitable commoditization of mobile communication service.  The new 700MHz band T-Mobile bought up has requirements for openness, and that may help, but it's not certain T-Mobile will actually obey them.