Yeah, yeah, let's bitch. But who's going to vouch for all the mandated stuff that has to work? Oops some requisite form/filing/testing was skipped? Who's going to stand up with a target on their back to be sued when someone dies after 911 doesn't work? Who's going to be responsible when some bug in your phone floods/knocks out your cell and denies 911 service to others? Does the law allow you to waive compliance with all of that stuff on equipment you don't own (towers)? I honestly don't know but good luck getting an answer other than "no" or "not sure" and a general default punting of liability/ability to waive policies to the next guy.
Of course, magic hurdle number one is either getting a cell stack (GSM/CDMA) that you have rights to distribute, by either licensing (as Google does) or writing one yourself (as seems to be impossible given "open" standards). AFAIK there are no FOSS stacks.
Nobody, because A)the cellular radio is on a separate chip and has nothing to do with the OS, and B)people already install ROMs on their phones today, without having to be regulatory compliant. All I'm asking for is an Ubuntu ROM, because while CyanogenMod is cool, GNU>Android.
I agree completely about FOSS. But, based on my experience porting CyanogenMod to my old phone, things are not as compartmentalized as you would hope. For example, the user initiating a call to 911 and control of audio is not managed by the radio chip.
The radio is not completely isolated. I have broken ROMs such that dialing 911 does not work. The phone I spent time hacking on had the radio attached over USB, and there were all sorts of magic AT chats that were managed by some proprietary library. Also, firmware on the radio was loaded into the radio by the OS. Anyway, my point is these things are not obviously separable, particularly at the holistic level of what's required by laws and regulations.
Phones aren't required to make 911 calls. Consider the case of your MiFi access point. The Ubuntu phone could just be a smart access point.
We shouldn't let artificial restrictions get in the way of Free Software. The pre-alpha-Github version does not need to be perfect. It just needs to lay the foundation for perfection to be added later.
I assume it's nice to be flippant about laws and FCC regulations when you're not legally holding the bag. To be clear I don't know what sorts of things are required of "phones". I do know it was an issue when IP-based phones from cable companies were initially advertised as phones but lacked 911 services. My point is that from the standpoint of near complete ignorance of rules and regulations it's quite easy to bitch about heavily regulated items.
You're wrong. There are at least three full-featured FOSS GSM stacks: Qtopia (discontinued by Nokia, but forked by Openmoko community as QtMoko), freesmartphone.org (with two iterations - first one written in Python, and second one written in Vala; I'm using it on my phone) and oFono.
You can't use non-certified firmware for modems, like OsmocomBB for TI Calypso, on public networks (yes, there is even free software GSM modem firmware!), but GSM stacks in user space are possible and legal.
He's saying ubuntu should quit waiting for a manufacturer to knock their door down, and allow developers /end users to put this on their own device. As someone waiting for ubuntu4android since 'forever', i agree.
E: Mark S suggests that ROMs would be available for existing devices and not just through OEMs on the interview w/ engadget-- but isn't 100% explicit, and mentioned nothing about when to expect any builds.
I agree. I've been all over Firefox OS, even though I can't get a legit device for another few months. The lack of an ability for me to test drive this now is kind of an announcement killer.
Seconding this. I'm very much for what Mozilla is trying to do with Firefox OS. I want to give it a spin. Heck, maybe even contribute. It's, after all, for a very good cause.
But the fact that my Galaxy nexus is a "tier 3" phone which has no guarantees of even working, and that the "tier 1" phones are phones you cannot buy, my ability and willingness to wipe my working OS from my phone (which I need) for something unproven is very close to zero.
Had they provided some good and working images for phones available today, chances that they would get more attention and recognition would be much, much higher. Not providing that has (IMO) been a mistake which has cost them, both publicity and potential contributors.
And now Ubuntu seems to be making the same mistake for their phone-OS. It's a strategic mistake and it will cost them the chance to impact the market.
"...there are no immediate plans for actual Ubuntu phones, and no carriers have been signed up yet ... although we're told that the OS will run on any new phone built for Android, should the manufacturer see merit in installing Ubuntu instead." from here:
Looks like they updated the text, but still. The manufacturer doesn't install things on my phone, I do. Looks like they also mention a Nexus build in the coming weeks. When that happens I'll consider my challenge met. I'm just hoping something actually comes of this, unlike Ubuntu for Android which went nowhere.
I'm also extremely annoyed by mentions of manufacturers here. I don't need Dell's blessing to install Ubuntu on my laptop, and I don't need HTC's blessing to install an alternate OS on my phone. So give me the software, already.
>The manufacturer doesn't install things on my phone, I do.
And you expect for the operating system you install to have working drivers. Which are written by the hardware manufacturer, unless you want to wait for the open source community to reverse engineer them (which takes many months or years).
Nobody is saying that you can't hack whatever OS you want onto whatever device you own. But playing nice with the people who are in the best position to make it easy for you to do that is clearly something that Canonical has an interest in doing, and I don't think we should fault them with that.
You'll certainly be able to install it on your phone, but Ubuntu can't reasonably count on that only to get adoption. If manufacturers don't ship Ubuntu phones, the OS is doomed.
Well to quote Torvalds himself, "most people don't want to install an operating system on their computer of cellphone".
This is probably the #1 reason for lack of uptake of Linux on the desktop.
The problem is extra hard with phones because manufacturers seem to have more measures in place to prevent people from easily installing third party operating systems.
That's assuming you have a method to unlock it, you can't always necessarily count on that.
I can kind of understand why they don't want to release it until there is a reference implementation and the software is somewhere near done.
They don't want to suffer the same problem they have done on the desktop where there are a load of device out there which are "kind of" supported and they get a bad rep because somebodies sound , wireless or whatever doesn't quite work as they expect and they have to field a load of support requests and people proclaiming that their OS is "too hard" or whatever.
> That's assuming you have a method to unlock it, you can't always necessarily count on that.
For a long time, we couldn't count on video cards or sound cards being compatible with Linux either. The Linux community just shared information about which computers were most compatible, with the most open hardware, and we bought those devices.
The same thing could happen with phones. Even without being installable on EVERY device, surely some of the manufacturers will stick to fairly standard hardware and the Ubuntu community will see to it that the drivers and unlocking tools are there. Not everyone will be able to get Ubuntu on their phone, but the community can still thrive.
The problem though as canonical seems to have discovered on the desktop is that there isn't much of a business model for catering only to a geeky community of enthusiasts.
I think there's a difference between catering to a geeky/technical audience and leaving an entry-level developer feature available. We want these devices (tablets, smartphones, etc) to be little computers, but they aren't and they won't be without basics like a usable bootloader. With such basics available, the geeky/foss/linux/etc community can at least tinker and adapt existing software. At the moment most of the effort is proof-of-concept chroots and just figuring out how to boot a custom kernel, never getting as far as hardware support. Device manufacturers are laughing, happy that none of them can be used as computers. It means a new sale for a slightly different UI feature (wasn't the point of computers changing the software - including the OS?). IBM didn't intend to make a general purpose PC - they just wanted to be in the game, so they sacrificed controlling the integration. Thank goodness for that, because it led to the PC as we know it. Tablets and smartphones are convenient, but they are still not computers. All the parts are there though... All they have to do is leave uboot on. It doesn't mean the UI has to be made for a geek; it's negligible effort, and I hope Ubuntu ushers in that change.
