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Comment by kkowalczyk | Hacker News Reader

The openness of Android, the OS, has nothing to do with it.

Google Movies service is just another application running on Android.

If you had "Dsl Movies" application for Android (or iOS or Windows) you would have a right to protect your service from people trying to watch the movies for free or extract them from your service and post them on the internet.

Why do you think that Google has no such right to protect their movie service?

As to general snarkiness about openness of Android: please come back when you can download source code to iOS or WP7 or BlackBerry, compile it and then install on your device.

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As to general snarkiness about openness of Android: please come back when you can download source code to iOS or WP7 or BlackBerry, compile it and then install on your device.

While I agree the snarkiness doesn't help his point and in fact has no bearing on the argument at all, to say Google is OK to not release the source for their self-proclaimed, open system because other vendors have not released the source for their self-proclaimed, extremely closed systems is ludicrous.

I think his point is that Google has released their source. As he pointed out, Google Movies is an application and it doesn't have to be open-source just because the Android OS is open-source. It's a completely independent piece of code.

Anyway, this is much ado about nothing since I'm sure there will be a patched version out almost immediately.

Really? Please point me to the Honeycomb source for my Xoom.*

* I don't actually own a Xoom, but that's not the point.

http://source.android.com/source/downloading.html

You know that Honeycomb is not available (the whole point of the GP) and your 'eat this' link is totally not helpful?

If you'd followed that you'd seen that you will end up with Gingerbread instead [1].

1: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/dalvik.git;a=heads

Actually, the GPL and LGPL portions of Honeycomb have been in the repositories for a while. What most people are clamoring for, is actually the portions that aren't GPL/LGPL.

Still waiting on Honeycomb. And point to me barebone OSS android without Google's proprietary magic dust's market share.

> Still waiting on Honeycomb.

How is that remotely related to the article?

It's very relevant to the comment I was replying to.

Um, go build AOSP? Build CM? Build Sapphire?

There are several ways to build vanilla Android just fine. The only Google App on my phone is Market. How are people so incredibly uninformed about Android still?

AllenKids either hasn't used an Android phone in the past 18 months or is getting his information for really poor/biased/uninformed sources.

Manually managing app/tasks in Android is a recipe for really poor performance and battery life. Anything after Eclair will handle app killing very appropriately. I've only had one app that needed killing and even then, I haven't had to kill it recently at all with CM7 running the show.

DRM and a truly open platform cannot co-exist. It is impossible. When you control a point in the stack, you control everything below it. A good example of this is VMware.

My comment was a bit snarky, the but the point remains. I can't get my hands on the latest sources so I can add a fix to prevent applications from detecting rooted devices (a cat and mouse game for sure, but beside the point). My money would also be on Google shitting a very large brick and trying to find a subtile way to prevent my patch from working.

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