Thread: Sony Ericsson Xperia X3
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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2009-07-23 , 22:13
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#29
Originally Posted by johnkzin View Post
The question in my mind isn't "is Android open/free" -- it is. Anyone can download it, modify it, redistribute it, do what they want. And people have shown that you can even load other versions of Android onto the devices (hacked versions of Android, pre-releases of Android installed manually, etc.). Things layered on top of Android (the HTC Hero's advanced UI) aren't open/free, but that's not any different than Gnu/Linux. From an openness and freedom point of view, Android isn't any different than Gnu/Linux.
Originally Posted by johnkzin View Post
Android, on the other hand, is built around a GPLed core.
Pls correct me if I'm wrong (and I mean it), but isn't Android Apache v2, not GPL? That's one of the main points in anti-Android rants.... that it is not GPL (or at least LGPL), so company XY can take the code, change it, relicense it under a closed source license so that you, the end user who bought the handset, will never see one single line of source code, let alone be able to change it and run the changed version on your device.
Last edited by benny1967; 2009-07-23 at 22:20.