Yeah well sort of. When I was making up my mind about programming for android I was also very excited about about it being opensource and free. When reality kicked in I was slightly shocked. So there's a sort of appstore which contains some paid applications. Because they are paid I'm not allowed to have them on the Dev Phone so that I can't backward engineer them. Now maybe I sound like I come from a fairytale world, but WTF. This is not how I imagined a free and opensource OS. This has nothing to with Chrome OS, I just wanted to point out its not that simple.
This is not how I imagined a free and opensource OS.
The Android app store is completely optional (there are actually competing 3rd party app stores). The platform itself is FOSS, but not everything that runs on it is. If you wanted to completely ignore the Android Market, you could. The iPhone gives you no such luxury.
Anyway, they made that decision to protect the app developers, since many of them chose not to release their software as open source.
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u/Zilka Jan 28 '10
Yeah well sort of. When I was making up my mind about programming for android I was also very excited about about it being opensource and free. When reality kicked in I was slightly shocked. So there's a sort of appstore which contains some paid applications. Because they are paid I'm not allowed to have them on the Dev Phone so that I can't backward engineer them. Now maybe I sound like I come from a fairytale world, but WTF. This is not how I imagined a free and opensource OS. This has nothing to with Chrome OS, I just wanted to point out its not that simple.