223 million open source smartphones by 2014?
 

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/N...phone-studies/

Thought you guys might find this rather interesting. With so much open source hitting the market, it makes you wonder what cool stuff will be coming down for Maemo to compete in such a market. :) lol. Compete. I find that rather funny considering it won't be the blood thirsty, cut throat warfare of normal corporate competition, but rather more of a friendly sparing match in which everyone wins. :D

Re: 223 million open source smartphones by 2014?
 

Considering all the variants of Linux that are already popular choices in Asia, the very fast profileration of Android, and then Nokia pushing Maemo to a number of devices by that time, yes, its possible.

Re: 223 million open source smartphones by 2014?
 

On a related note....

Why doesn't Linux have viruses? Considering that it is open source i would expect it to have more viruses than closed source ones.

Thoughts?

Re: 223 million open source smartphones by 2014?
 

There are multiple contributory factors, but there seem to be two main reasons:

1. Linux grew out of the Unix tradition which has always supported explicit permissions and a clear separation between regular users and the superuser ("root"). This limited the scope of damage that could be done by an exploited application. Windows, on the other hand, grew out of a single-user system and for reasons of backwards compatibility accommodated regular programs running with administrator privileges. Those applications can therefore wreak wider havoc when exploited.

2. The culture at Microsoft for many years appeared to be driven to produce feature-laden software even if security considerations had to take second place.

Contrary to your assumption, open source mitigates against viruses. Many eyeballs viewing the source code makes it more likely that weaknesses will be spotted and fixed. With closed-source code, the "bad guys" are still decompiling the code and looking at it, but the "good guys" don't get to see the code.

Regards,
Roger

Re: 223 million open source smartphones by 2014?
 

Yeah, what eiffel said. :) And all those eyeballs create other advantages too, like keeping malware, DRM and other undesirable "features" and technologies out of the code.