On 21 December 2011 10:34, Karl Berry <[email protected]> wrote: > On the other hand, rms's essay > (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.html) concludes > Android remains effectively nonfree. Which implies we shouldn't do any > hosting.
That essay covers a lot of ground, and some aspects of it are obsolete: the Android 3.x source is now public. (There is an update saying "the 4.0 source is now out" but it doesn't clarify the 3.0 source is also in their git mirror.) Leaving that aside the main objection is that almost all Android devices ship with non-free software: firmware, Google proprietary apps, CarrierIQ, vendor shovelware. But you can build a new image from source leaving all of this out, and the firmware is comparable to the firmware in all modern hardware. You can run <http://www.android-x86.org/> on a vm and then everything down to the vm is free (the hardware beneath it is your own problem.) -- Martin
