There is no such thing as a benevolent publically traded company.
For all intents and purposes, they are restricted from being so if they ever wanted to be.
Any “charity” is an investment in PR Marketing AND a tax break that robs our shared commons of their share after our society facilitated their success. They spend more advertising what they “donated” than they gave to the charity. That’s not charity, it’s a transaction.
It didn’t used to be this way everywhere prior to the Reagan/Welch fire sale, the happiness of customers and employees still had some sway, but today, Private shareholders now demand and get litigious if companies aren’t maximizing greed/return/metastasis at any and all expense. Burn the commons if it’ll get you an extra nickel, shareholders expect maximum reutrn. It is their job to do anything they can get away with to give their greedy shareholders ever moooooooooaaaaaaar for doing nothing.
And sorry, no, I don’t respect capital investment return. It’s gambling, often with loaded insider info dice, It’s not labor and you probably got it by exploiting a lot people if you have a considerable amount under this system. Labor makes the homes, labor makes the food, labor provides the infrastructure and utilities. These shareholders didn’t discover or invent shit, their laboring engineers and researchers did. All shareholders are are the raw resource/property/land hostage takers. That’s all.
And it’s destroying our society, civilization in general, and even the very air we all COMMUN-ally breathe.
I guess we hate the idea of cooperating as a species so much, we’d rather suffocate.
You can charge for FOSS.(Free Open Source Software). The “fee” stands for “freedom”. It preserves the users right to freely inspect the code, modify it, re-use it and even sell it on unmodified or modified.
Would Androids be “useless” without google apps? I really don’t think so. Sure, less convenient, but GrapheneOS exists and is doing stellar. We have also known for a while this stuff is heavily subsidized by carriers. Thats why you have locked versions of phones and the like.
It is scummy. But this isn’t even close to the worst of what Google does. We can also take Android for ourselves and already have (GrapheneOS, as mentioned). I love Android, but I am unsure how beneficial these big tech giants are becoming.
Fire tablets already proved this. They don’t use Google apps, they have their own app store and their own push. And they sold tons of them. All of this can be done and Android isn’t “useless” without it. It’s just harder.
I love Android, but I am unsure how beneficial these big tech giants are becoming.
The problem becomes that you kind of don’t have a choice. Sure someone else can stand up their own OS/push/store, but unfortunately their monopoly of sorts ends up useful in these cases because it means literally everyone develops against it. You can get your own store working, but it’s only as popular as the number of developers who choose to support it. If you fragment the stores, you make them less useful, so by nature they kinda need to be a monopoly.
I just wish it ended up differently such that the behemoth store was owned by someone different than the manufacturer themselves.
There’s a very important distinction between AOSP, and the Android that’s ultimately shipped on most devices.
As the article says, they make a colossal amount of money from GMS, PlayStore cuts, and other things. That doesn’t mean that you can’t pull AOSP from the core repository, and get it to work on something. It’ll just be crippled by the lack of apps/store frontend, and a lot of the proprietary features that go on Pixel devices, for example.
Through licensing, they are required to disclose any changes they made to the kernel, but that’s the extent of it
This is precisely why any argument against gpl is laughable. Android is Linux. But a kernel without a userland is pointless. And that’s how Google operates: they use the kernel (which they want to replace) and then rewrite as much as they can with MIT licensed or proprietary code. The goal being to lock down the platforms in spite of the so-called “open source” software.
This comment is sent from my iPhone where the story is even sadder. Darwin does what Google wishes Linux could do, as far as licensing goes.
I use an unrooted Android phone without a Google account, any Google apps, Google Play Services or the Play Store.
And it works perfectly fine.
The userland is there, it’s just generally less convenient and feature-rich than what Google offers, and disabling the Google stuff is an extra step that is far beyond what normal people want to deal with.
The open secret of Open Source is that successful projects are largely the playground of capitalists. Who has the time to develop and maintain a whole mobile OS with all of the services people have come to expect, for no compensation? Surely the money flows in from interested parties who can then use the software to their advantage.
Much of the fundamental pieces of iOS and macOS is open source too. Darwin/XNU are open-source, but no one is under the impression that any of this effort is to benefit anyone other than Apple. Sure, Darwin-based alternative OSes exist, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are anything but curiosities, waiting to be derailed by Apple when they get too large.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Open-source ≠ non-profit
There is no such thing as a benevolent publically traded company.
For all intents and purposes, they are restricted from being so if they ever wanted to be.
Any “charity” is an investment in PR Marketing AND a tax break that robs our shared commons of their share after our society facilitated their success. They spend more advertising what they “donated” than they gave to the charity. That’s not charity, it’s a transaction.
It didn’t used to be this way everywhere prior to the Reagan/Welch fire sale, the happiness of customers and employees still had some sway, but today, Private shareholders now demand and get litigious if companies aren’t maximizing greed/return/metastasis at any and all expense. Burn the commons if it’ll get you an extra nickel, shareholders expect maximum reutrn. It is their job to do anything they can get away with to give their greedy shareholders ever moooooooooaaaaaaar for doing nothing.
And sorry, no, I don’t respect capital investment return. It’s gambling, often with loaded insider info dice, It’s not labor and you probably got it by exploiting a lot people if you have a considerable amount under this system. Labor makes the homes, labor makes the food, labor provides the infrastructure and utilities. These shareholders didn’t discover or invent shit, their laboring engineers and researchers did. All shareholders are are the raw resource/property/land hostage takers. That’s all.
And it’s destroying our society, civilization in general, and even the very air we all COMMUN-ally breathe.
I guess we hate the idea of cooperating as a species so much, we’d rather suffocate.
Carry on.
B Corps exist. Don’t know if there’s a conflict with being certified and publicly traded though.
Yeah so? Can people not monetize open source now?
You can charge for FOSS.(Free Open Source Software). The “fee” stands for “freedom”. It preserves the users right to freely inspect the code, modify it, re-use it and even sell it on unmodified or modified.
But you certainly can charge for it.
removed by mod
So, this week, we are talking about deGoogling on !android@lemmy.world.
https://lemmy.world/post/9772354
You guys are very welcome to join in the conversation.
Would Androids be “useless” without google apps? I really don’t think so. Sure, less convenient, but GrapheneOS exists and is doing stellar. We have also known for a while this stuff is heavily subsidized by carriers. Thats why you have locked versions of phones and the like.
It is scummy. But this isn’t even close to the worst of what Google does. We can also take Android for ourselves and already have (GrapheneOS, as mentioned). I love Android, but I am unsure how beneficial these big tech giants are becoming.
Fire tablets already proved this. They don’t use Google apps, they have their own app store and their own push. And they sold tons of them. All of this can be done and Android isn’t “useless” without it. It’s just harder.
The problem becomes that you kind of don’t have a choice. Sure someone else can stand up their own OS/push/store, but unfortunately their monopoly of sorts ends up useful in these cases because it means literally everyone develops against it. You can get your own store working, but it’s only as popular as the number of developers who choose to support it. If you fragment the stores, you make them less useful, so by nature they kinda need to be a monopoly.
I just wish it ended up differently such that the behemoth store was owned by someone different than the manufacturer themselves.
Is this really a revelation to anyone? Obviously Google (a for profit company) makes money off of it or they wouldn’t do it.
Exactly. This article is a big nothing burger.
Android is absolutely proprietary, AOSP is open source. ASOP makes no money, Android does. In a perfect world OEMs would ship AOSP but they don’t.
There’s a very important distinction between AOSP, and the Android that’s ultimately shipped on most devices.
As the article says, they make a colossal amount of money from GMS, PlayStore cuts, and other things. That doesn’t mean that you can’t pull AOSP from the core repository, and get it to work on something. It’ll just be crippled by the lack of apps/store frontend, and a lot of the proprietary features that go on Pixel devices, for example.
Through licensing, they are required to disclose any changes they made to the kernel, but that’s the extent of it
This is precisely why any argument against gpl is laughable. Android is Linux. But a kernel without a userland is pointless. And that’s how Google operates: they use the kernel (which they want to replace) and then rewrite as much as they can with MIT licensed or proprietary code. The goal being to lock down the platforms in spite of the so-called “open source” software.
This comment is sent from my iPhone where the story is even sadder. Darwin does what Google wishes Linux could do, as far as licensing goes.
I use an unrooted Android phone without a Google account, any Google apps, Google Play Services or the Play Store.
And it works perfectly fine.
The userland is there, it’s just generally less convenient and feature-rich than what Google offers, and disabling the Google stuff is an extra step that is far beyond what normal people want to deal with.
Butbutbut itsfree
But is it really?
Sometimes, in fact I’d daresay most times, it is that witch comes free that costs us the most
Edit: you could get even weirder but I dont want to further encourage you
hooligansLemmingz 😬I hate that witch!
English is not my first language, but should that not be “which”?
Made me laugh though!
If you don’t wanna be funny, ya ;)
Point well made <3
The open secret of Open Source is that successful projects are largely the playground of capitalists. Who has the time to develop and maintain a whole mobile OS with all of the services people have come to expect, for no compensation? Surely the money flows in from interested parties who can then use the software to their advantage.
Much of the fundamental pieces of iOS and macOS is open source too. Darwin/XNU are open-source, but no one is under the impression that any of this effort is to benefit anyone other than Apple. Sure, Darwin-based alternative OSes exist, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are anything but curiosities, waiting to be derailed by Apple when they get too large.
Wooh. Interesting, had no idea (about the iOS thing), thanks for sharing.