Just one more reminder (as if we needed one) that law & order only applies to us proles.

I guess Jared Polis (etal) doesn’t have to worry about getting kicked off of Eric Schmidt’s Xmas list. Hell, he might even get invitations to all the right holiday parties…

Google jet trips to Aruba for everyone!

At a hotel desk in SF ten years ago, I watched Eric Schmidt pull the “don’t you know who I am?!” schtick with “the help.” I knew then all I needed to know about Dr. Schmidt.

Boarding passes for stocking stuffers. Yeah…that’ll work!

Actually Jane, Microsoft skated:
With Bush, government proves loyal Microsoft ally – The New York Times
“Microsoft was saved from being split in half by a federal appeals court decision handed down early in the Bush administration. The ruling, in 2001, found that the company had repeatedly abused its monopoly power in the software business, but it reversed a lower court order sought by the Clinton administration to split up the company.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/business/worldbusiness/10iht-10microsoft.6072857.html?pagewanted=all

Does anyone even bother to throw the “Don’t be evil” thing in their faces anymore?

Actually & actually Apple lost its GUI infringement case of the 90′s, though Microsoft immediately invested a few hundred million dollars in Apple without anyone’s calling it a settlement; the DOJ bust-up prevented Microsoft from bundling Internet Explorer with Windows as the default web browser.

Which is what saved Lycos, Alta Vista, Prodigy, Northern Light, Netscape….errr…check that.

The Android operating system is derived from Linux, and open source. While this isn’t everything, it’s pretty important, and makes Google not-so-evil, with respect to smartphone operating systems anyway.

Why?

Let’s not just include one quote, though:
——————————————
“It’s called capitalism,” Eric Schmidt told Bloomberg in a Wednesday article. “We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”

“We pay lots of taxes; we pay them in the legally prescribed ways,” he said. “I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate.”

Bloomberg reported on Monday that Google avoided paying $2 billion in global income taxes last year by housing profits in Bermuda, which has no corporate income tax.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/google-tax-dodge_n_2292077.html
———————————————–
Because we know how much Google business occurs in Bermuda.

The relationship between Google and Linux is complicated:

http://lwn.net/Articles/446297/

It’s only recently that the Android “Fork” is being brought back slowly into the mainline. Google uses Linux in almost all of it’s various applications because the open source development model has been very successful.

The battleground of the software behemoths has settled into making software or IP patents a serious impediment to our society:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/08/intellectual-property

Given that the people who really did “invent” the whole windows/mouse/desktop thingy were not Apple or Microsoft, there was a certain irony in the whole debate back in the 90s:

http://hightechhistory.com/2011/06/02/a-brief-early-history-of-xerox-parc-and-the-development-of-the-personal-computer/

Even the touchscreen/desktop GUI used by Apple or Google is itself nothing new but another development of previous work. I was developing systems using touchscreens back in the late 80s as were many other people. IP patents and the resulting legal battles are an indication that the free and open development of science and technology is also being financialized and comoditized by large corporate interests (the parallels to what happen on Wall St which lead to economic implosion are valid IMHO.)

But really, the significant concerns about Google in general is their warehousing of all user’s information, and a poor understanding of their handling of this data with regard to any government, corporation or organization wanting access.

Nokia’s Lumia 920 and the rest of the new Lumia line is going to take a huge chunk out of Android. Even the new iPhone5 seems to have gotten nothing but yawns next to the raves about Nokia’s new Windows phones.

“It’s only recently that the Android “Fork” is being brought back slowly into the mainline”

But it *is* being brought back into the mainline, yes? While the discussion at your first link is a little too “inside” for me to follow, the main point is that Linux is GPL, therefore Android is GPL, and therefore its code is public and open, and therefore, in principle at least, anybody could go off and make an a smartphone with the Android operating system, and owe Google nothing. (And in response to bluedot12, this is why Android (and Google, in this respect) is not evil, as far as I can tell.)

Apparently Google and the Linux development community are not having an ideal interaction, but it’s not clear to me how much of this is ultimately harmful.

I have a complex reaction to this.

One is that, I work in telco, and am working on my development chops to make apps for Android. Which anyone can do if they download the free Java Development Kit (JDK) for Android.

So Java is way, way into this mix, and is a “bride” so to say, in the marriage of any Apple or Google technologies to get some mobile device to do “something.” So there’s Oracle and Ellison.

And working to make apps? Well, I have completed the first couple tutorials in the JDK Dev guide, and additionally made what is, essentially, a duplicate of the camera app on the Gingerbread OS. (OK, yawn all together!)

But the thing is, I could upload that app, and don’t need any approvals whatsoever, to the google app store, and anybody could download and install it. That is not the case with Apple. My app would need to be approved by Apple iTunes store, meet all their branding and dev guidelines, etc.

The other thing is that the Java wrap around the code to execute Linux is really smart – because of Linux. Linux is so, so compatible with the Unix Telco switches/computers that are embedded out there in mobile/cell land.

And so now MicroSoft comes up with 8, and I’m torn again. Because I have lotsa dev experience with Windows based applications and using VBA for Office environments. But I don’t see how I could really leverage that across a mobile platform, because of the Win 8 install-base, as well as that I am not clear on the Win 8 delivery platform to clients.

So here you are as a developer for mobile; you must use Java/Oracle, you must choose to program for iPhone installed base/iTunes delivery (requiring approval) or Android base or both. Then enter Win 8, with no install-base, but long time programmer skills laying out there. Smart money is covering all the dev bases.

So bottom line, I’ll switch gears! If there is a monopoly-minded manufacturer out there that I’m pissed at right now, it’s CISCO. Fucking router queens of the world, with something like 75-80% of the router install base, and they silently get away with it.

Linus recently said he expects all of the Android source to be re-integrated into the source tree about 2014-2015, covered by various GPLs althogh there is some activity (again IP patents) to dispute this:

http://www.osnews.com/story/24557/Torvalds_Android_GPL_Claims_Totally_Bogus_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

The GPL issues are not one of my strong points, but if you want a totally open implementation, Debian is the way to go. (I use the close source GPU drivers to get better performance so even though I’ve used Linux since 1996, and am currently using Debian, I’m not running a “clean” system.)

I tend to agree with Jane on this issue, just because Google has been a big proponent of Linux and open source would not make them guilt free of using their money and political clout to get what they want – fair or unfair. Google chooses to use Linux because the bang for the buck in software development costs runs rings around Microsoft’s method.