[ale] Cory Doctorow, right again

[mike at trausch.us]

On 03/17/2012 12:18 PM, Charles Shapiro wrote:
> Please to note this issue is only tangentially related to the "I can
> read the code" security argument over open source software.  This is
> more basic.  Regardless of your feeliings about open versus closed
> software and the security or other trade-offs involved in that, you
> must Must MUST have control over what's installed on your device.  (
> And yes, the Radio and other binary blobs in Cyanogen-Mod bother me. )

Indeed.  I don't like them, myself.

There was something I read a while back about an effort to produce free
drivers for these phones.  That would be pretty cool, because it would
enable people to be able to experiment with things like using a BSD, or
completely getting rid of the Bionic/Dalvik/Java/Android stack and strip
things back to a very basic interface.

I don't want a phone where I am forced to use a command line to make and
receive phone calls, of course.  But I want something that is
lightweight, open, and much more "securable" than current Android
systems are.  For example, I would like to be able to make secure
telephone calls with my phone.  While that can likely be done in the
phone's current state, it would be far better done if we have access to
all of the source.

It's a shame that the Linux kernel developers feel the way that they do
about binary blobs, actually.  They are the only people that truly have
the power to do something about it, and the more deployment they see the
more power they have.  Nobody at this point is about to say that they're
going to simply abandon their Linux systems, and I think that if the
core development community really pushed, I think that companies would
say "well, we need to release things, then".

Perhaps I am overly confident.

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”

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