judgecorp writes “Telefonica has added some detail to the Firefox OS picture, following the announcement of phones by two manufacturers earlier this week. The Qualcomm-built handset shown by Telefonica in London ran the HTML5 OS and showed multitasking as well as a range of HTML5 applications. Firefox-maker Mozilla receives a lot of funding from Google, but Telefonica sees Firefox OS as a way to achieve independence from Google. It will be more open than Android, and will run on lower-specification hardware, according to the company’s director of products.” A common reaction to Firefox OS over the past few days has been to say that it’s doomed from the start. But Mozilla’s stated goals are to ‘promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Web for users and developers,’ rather than to compete with Android and iOS. What do you think they need to do in order to achieve that in a meaningful way?
aesoteric writes “Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has voiced a renewed desire to see the company open its architecture to the masses, allowing savvy users to expand and add to their products at will. However, Wozniak qualified his desire for a more open Apple by arguing that openness should not impinge on the quality of the products themselves. He also sees any change of heart on openness as a challenge when Apple continues to rake in huge cash with its current model.”
Plugh writes “In a victory for transparency and openness in government, and saving tax dollars, New Hampshire has passed HB418. State agencies are now required by law to consider open source software when acquiring software, and to promote the use of open data formats.”
suy writes “Several open source projects exist under a variety of licenses, and we qualify them as free/open source depending on the license under which the final product is released. But there are other considerations, like the existence of a public roadmap, participation in the decision making, or access to the latest source code to make contributions. Vision Mobile has published a report that compares and measures the openness of several open source projects: Android, Eclipse, Linux, MeeGo, Mozilla, Qt, Symbian (till the existence of the Foundation) and WebKit. Eclipse and Linux scored the highest and Android the lowest.” A related article about the report asks whether open source needs corporate backing to truly succeed.
FranckMartin writes “Little known to the general public, the Internet Engineering Task Force, celebrates its 25th birthday on the 16th of January. DNSSEC, IDN, SIP, IPv6, HTTP, MPLS … all acronyms that were codified at the IETF. But little known, one can argue the IETF does not exist; it just happens that people meet 3 times a year in some hotel around the world and are on mailing lists in between. The openness of the IETF and its structure has inspired the way ICANN is run, as well as the way the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has been open to the civil society.”
jamlam writes “The Android developers blog has a comment from their dev team on the recent ‘rooting’ of their Nexus S phones. It contains a call from Google to handset manufacturers to open up their phones to give users choice. But will this ever happen in a market dominated by lock-’em-down cellular networks?”
It’s been a busy week in the tech world: A new web browser wants to make your entire browsing experience more social. Google and Facebook are doing battle over contacts, openness, and reciprocity. And Adobe and Apple are sparring (again). All of which is a recipe for a great episode of OMG/JK.
Tune in to watch us trade jabs, witticisms, and, occasionally, small bursts of insight. And have no fear: we do address recent reports that hot laptops may be cooking mens’ testicles.
Here are some of the posts relevant to this week’s show:
It’s obviously a little early for a full assessment of this new device but we do know a few things. It’s quite small and compact – much lighter than and iPad – and the UI is very handsome. Android users will be kind of miffed that the device doesn’t support the Android App Store, however, because B&N want’s a “curated experience.” So much for the openness of Android.
As a recent Nook convert, I’m excited for B&N if a little wary. At $249 the Nook Color is half the price of the iPad. However, don’t expect this to act as a full tablet computer. It isn’t. It’s B&N’s show and outside software isn’t invited.
Thinkcloud writes “A user named Hexxeh has posted a video online of the iPad running Google’s upcoming Chrome OS. Hexxeh was able to put Chrome OS on an iPad because the open source code for the operating system is available in its Chromium state, but it’s not necessarily true that Apple will allow iPads to run other operating systems going forward. That’s typically not a level of openness found in the Apple playbook. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering what it might mean to have a robust OS like Apple’s on the same tablet as one that runs a cutting-edge operating system like Chrome OS. Why wouldn’t users love that?”
Thinkcloud writes “A user named Hexxeh has posted a video online of the iPad running Google’s upcoming Chrome OS. Hexxeh was able to put Chrome OS on an iPad because the open source code for the operating system is available in its Chromium state, but it’s not necessarily true that Apple will allow iPads to run other operating systems going forward. That’s typically not a level of openness found in the Apple playbook. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering what it might mean to have a robust OS like Apple’s on the same tablet as one that runs a cutting-edge operating system like Chrome OS. Why wouldn’t users love that?”
It’s obviously a little early for a full assessment of this new device but we do know a few things. It’s quite small and compact – much lighter than and iPad – and the UI is very handsome. Android users will be kind of miffed that the device doesn’t support the Android App Store, however, because B&N want’s a “curated experience.” So much for the openness of Android.