[ale] almost OT: Cyanogen mod

[George Allen]

>
>> They claim " we want to liberate Android from finacial grip of Google " and doing so with taking millions from others known and "unknown"
>> companies. So the question is who is going to harvest profits no really in favor of customer.
>> I see this like : You feed the dog, and the dog barks back at you :)
>
> Not exactly. The whole business of open source is that the community as a whole benefits. Up 'til now, the only major benefactors were the cellular providers, the tablet manufacturers, and Google.  Google has increasing tightened its grip on something it should have made more open over the years.  Remember, too, that Android is a Linux distribution at its heart.
>
...
> This is definitely a good thing, even if Google doesn't like it.  Which is the great thing about Android: Google might not like it, but because it is built on Open Source, then even Google can't do much about it lest it angers the populace.
>

Or ... like Oracle, they can just go ahead and anger the populace and
do what they want. Pick your favorite Sun project (opensolaris, zfs,
mysql, java) you'll find people who were ready go grab pitchforks and
flamewars and make actual forks over it... but the forks forced no
hands on Oracle's part. But they do provide alternatives to users, and
keep some avenues of open innovation open (ie Joyent, zfs, mariadb).