Hello to all,
I'm an old programmer, software manager, and hacker from the "blue box" days. Also a Linux hacker/programmer, mostly white hat these days, and open source zealot from way back.
In the dark old days of 1998 I had a protracted battle with my VP over adding Linux support to our products - I was running the software development group at the time. He was an old heavy iron guy, an ex-IBM-er from before the time of enlightenment at IBM (ie, when they still made billions selling "mainframes"). He actually said "why would I want to use an operating system written by a bunch of college students?" We got bought by Intel a couple years later and as you might imagine, the discussion was over. It's amazing how wrong an otherwise intelligent and educated manager can be. Must be the tie constricting blood flow to his head or something...
I was going to get a Droid but I waited it out and got a Driod 2. Glad I did, except for the whole locked bootloader thing. Should be an interesting legal battle when Google upgrades the Android kernel license to GPLv3. When they do that, as I understand it anyway, the suits at Motorola won't be able to "corporatize" a couple million lines of free source code and then lock it down, like they own the damn thing or something. MOT is just another company that just doesn't get free software, just like Tivo didn't get it - they pulled similar crap some time ago and just squeaked by under the v2 rules. MOT should talk to the guys at Novell, or IBM, or Intel. They kind of get it. Either way, in the long term there is a legal solution to this problem. In the short term there's guys like us. So I guess there's work to do.
Oh, did I mention I am very shy and never say what I think?
Mark
I'm an old programmer, software manager, and hacker from the "blue box" days. Also a Linux hacker/programmer, mostly white hat these days, and open source zealot from way back.
In the dark old days of 1998 I had a protracted battle with my VP over adding Linux support to our products - I was running the software development group at the time. He was an old heavy iron guy, an ex-IBM-er from before the time of enlightenment at IBM (ie, when they still made billions selling "mainframes"). He actually said "why would I want to use an operating system written by a bunch of college students?" We got bought by Intel a couple years later and as you might imagine, the discussion was over. It's amazing how wrong an otherwise intelligent and educated manager can be. Must be the tie constricting blood flow to his head or something...
I was going to get a Droid but I waited it out and got a Driod 2. Glad I did, except for the whole locked bootloader thing. Should be an interesting legal battle when Google upgrades the Android kernel license to GPLv3. When they do that, as I understand it anyway, the suits at Motorola won't be able to "corporatize" a couple million lines of free source code and then lock it down, like they own the damn thing or something. MOT is just another company that just doesn't get free software, just like Tivo didn't get it - they pulled similar crap some time ago and just squeaked by under the v2 rules. MOT should talk to the guys at Novell, or IBM, or Intel. They kind of get it. Either way, in the long term there is a legal solution to this problem. In the short term there's guys like us. So I guess there's work to do.
Oh, did I mention I am very shy and never say what I think?
Mark
