[qcc] TODO?

[Rob Landley]

On 10/22/2015 11:59 PM, Рысь wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 20:21:09 -0500
>> The entire PC industry's installed base is less than the annual
>> android unit shipments. Strategically, it's the fourth generation of
>> mainframe -> minicomputer -> microcomputer -> smartphone. Fighting
>> over PCs in 201x is like fighting over minicomputers in the 1990's.
>> It doesn't matter who wins, that ship is sinking.
> 
> Quality or quantity? The ship is sinking because the ship staff is
> punching holes in it. Money drive them, as usual.

The exact same quality vs quantity argument was made about
microcomputers in the late 1970's. The Vax guys were _sure_ those little
toys would never threaten their real computers.

> So what's it's all about? I do not try to demotivate you in either way,
> I just ask for "why such an attention to corporation-influenced binary
> OS".

Gee, why should I care about billion annual unit volume shipments which
are on course to be in posession of more than half the people on this
planet (children included) in the next year or two? That can't possibly
be of any interest to anybody, let me continue to focus on a system with
less than 2% desktop market share despite a quarter-century of trying
and failing to get any sort of end-user installed base. That's the ticket.

> I am already have your context about this (I had read your blog)
> and eated that much. I do not want more.

You think systemd on the rest of Linux _isn't_ corporation-influenced
stuff being forced down people's throats whether they want it or not?
Good luck with that.

The smartphone is reality, today. Ubuntu phone and firefox and sailfish
and so on aren't and won't be, any more than openmoko was.

The PC didn't start open. It was opened after the fact. It is possible
for partially open systems to become more open. But if the iPhone wins
and becomes the de-facto standard with the largest installed and
developer base, we're screwed. That's Microsoft all over again only
competent and owning the hardware too, and Moore's Law won't last enough
to give us another retrenchment.

> Moreover, from that context, I am in strange feeling about someone try
> to dictate overhead their own opinion like it's already happened and
> there is no way back.

The smartphone _has_ already happened. I'm not trying to convince you of
anything and don't really care about your opinion on that one.

>>
>>> I wonder why such a hype to a corporation-influenced binary OS.
>>
>> Because if you try to make your own phone ala openmoko, your unit
>> volume is so low it prices itself out of the market, and then you
>> can't get a data plan for it because the providers don't notice (or
>> care) you exist. I'm not the FSF, I care about trying to improve the
>> world we've got rather than imagining a cloud castle and insisting
>> everyone live there with no path from here to there.
>>
>> The PC didn't start out open, it was _opened_ by cloners like compaq
>> who survived lawsuits to defend their right to clone it. The open
>> S/100 systems of the day died out due to lack of interest (and yes
>> they went 16 bit with Z8000 and 8086 cards and such: nobody cared).
>> They didn't take an open system and make it successful, they took a
>> successful system and levered it open. That's what worked last time.
>> Strategically they focused on the PC because it had the smallest
>> number of proprietary bottlenecks (mostly just the BIOS). This time
>> I'm focusing on Android for similar strategic reasons, making
>> multiple billions of existing Android devices programmable and
>> rootable is easier than trying to make firefox phones or ubuntu
>> phones ever matter to anybody.
>>
>> By the way, my $DAYJOB is trying to fix the long-term "corporation
>> influenced binary hardware" problem at a much deeper level than all
>> this:
>>
>> https://lwn.net/Articles/647636/
>>
>> Rob
> 
> Androids usually:
> 
> - Need rooting (what? I can't own my device? This is stupid, but simple
> question)

It's built into Google's phones:

https://www.androidpit.com/how-to-unlock-nexus-5-bootloader

If you buy a phone from another vendor who's locked it down so you need
a bug exploit to do the same thing, blaming Google is kinda silly.

> - Not a PC (what? I can't build MY OWN Linux for it? This is stupid,
> but, again, simple question. Look, I even had thrown away guts from my
> router, why can't I apply same to this phone?)

Cyanogenmod has existed for years, I've never bothered to install it on
any of my old phones (nor my current one).

In theory you don't even need cyanogenmod, you can build an image for a
number of phones from AOSP, and install it on the phone, but nobody
cares. Anybody who wanted to could fork AOSP and make distros out of it.
Again, nobody cares...

> - Consumer-only devices that do not permit creation of anything beyond
> typing texts on your photos before sending them to hipster photo
> services

Um, yes, that would be exactly what I'm trying to _fix_ by turning
Android into a self-hosting development enviroment out of the box? (Not
as an aftermarket add-on but by increasing the development tools they
ship _with_ the device?)

http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost

"There is this thing it doesn't do! Why would you try to make it do that?"

> - Gaming platforms with completely unrelated games (but at least I
> can't play quake on it. I know that because of size mismatch)

I just googled "quake on android" and got rather a lot of hits that say
you didn't google "quake on android"...?

> - Slowly turn their owners into infants (I rejected that effect early)

Right. I'm going to stop paying attention to you now. Goodbye.

Have fun with your Vax,

Rob

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