1) Most users do not need or want root access to their mobile phones or even any of their devices. There's a reason that in UNIX land users and root are separate things.

2) If you really want root, you CAN get it. Yes some manufacturers make it harder than others, but that's again because 99.99...% of users have no need or desire for it, and making it easier for the tiny, tiny number of people who want it is not a worthwhile investment.

Now you can argue that their efforts to make it even harder to get root access are shitty, and I won't disagree with you, but nobody's forcing you to buy these devices.

3) DOS/Windows 95/etc. are not awesome. Pretending it's awesome just because it was "open" (no permission system) and "backwards compatible" (debatable in many cases) is stupid. You're letting nostalgia or your hatred for "closed" systems bias you. Just because thing A isn't perfect doesn't make thing B great. Both thing A and thing B can be shitty, or they can both be good.

4) Linux is fucking everywhere in 2013. It owns the web. It is on most mobile phones. Even Apple devices are running a fork of BSD. So, how is this a Pyrrhic victory? Just because it's not exactly what you want? I'm so sorry.

There's a, frankly, revolting tendency in geek culture to be absolutist. That if something is not 100%, exactly, totally, purely aligned to your personal vision it's fucking garbage, or worse, evil and bad. This is childish and it's time to grow up.

2) No you cant. You must use exploits/vulnerabilities usually. The only vendor that I know of that just sends you unlock code on request is HTC.

3) Yesterday I played Diablo 1 on my windows 8 machine. 3 months before that - Lotus (the game). That is measured in decades. How backwards capability is debatable.

4) Yes linux is everywhere. But invisible - moving the servers, or hidden below deep layers of customized software in the consumer devices. The linux ideology - nowhere to be seen.

Having the ability to run simple firewall to control what processes use your data plan is hardly absolutism. Or editing memory value of a running process.

Edit: Do you support the Chinese Great Firewall - because there is no difference in restricting access to internet and to software in principle?

EDIT: I realize we may be imagining different scenarios. I was thinking about the example given, of running original DOS programs in modern computers.

2) I didn't say you can do it easily, I said you CAN do it.

3) Yes and I can run decades old UNIX software on OS X or Ubuntu. So what?

My point about debatable backwards compatibility is that some old DOS software does NOT work well in modern Windows. Some does, some doesn't. If you haven't experienced problems, lucky you.

4) You made my point for me here.

I'm not arguing any further, you're clearly a zealot, and have exactly the kind of attitude I was talking about.

> I'm not arguing any further, you're clearly a zealot

Is this not part of a wider discussion about ownership and 'unregulated rights' for stuff such as books, music, films as well as hardware?

Global comment: Shuttleworth can do the public relations can't he?

But if Subaru tell you that you cannot tune aftermarket your Subaru or you must drive it only on Subaru approved roads in California (but not Nevada) it is stupid.

Currently we are in the reverse dongle situation- in the 90s you need that dongle so your software (OrCAD back then) can work. Now is the opposite - you may like the hardware but we actively prevent you for using it with other software.

The problem comes from the fact that modern devices are general purpose PCs in ultra small factors. You couldn't change nokia 3310 OS back then, but you needed not because the thing was a phonebook with antenna. But nowadays with so much of your life stored in the smartphone the idea that someone has higher privileges/easier access to your data than you is between repulsive and frightening.

I think you're confusing Linux with the Free Software movement. Linux, the kernel, is all about open source producing high quality software - at least from Linus Torvalds' point of view.

Well, to some of us, and after the Really Important Things™ that most of us agree with, we also find software freedom to be extremely important.

Since you know absolutely nothing about me I find it hilarious that you would make assertions about my values.

I tried a little experiment: I supposed that venomsnake commented in good faith, and isn't crazy. I could not find disconfirmation. In his/her first sentence, there's a proposal that there are some virtues to MS's approach, and that dethroning those virtues might not be an unalloyed good. In the second sentence, there's an observation that the new regime has substantial drawbacks (for some people's values, including many HN readers). The third sentence is a bit hyperbolic, true, but the fourth sums up fairly even-handedly by calling the victory pyrrhic (which does still mean victory, btw). What's the problem?

On the other hand, your first sentence is nothing but vitriol, your last sentence is nothing but vitriol, and you allocate time in the middle to a sarcastic "I'm so sorry", and to misrepresenting venomsnake's comment (about "open" and "backwards-compatible"), just so you can call it "stupid". All in all, not very nice.

And venomsnake replied to you with far more politeness than you deserved, and for that you called him-or-her a zealot.

I totally missed the bit where you're "preaching tolerance", sorry if that's thick of me. Could you point it out?

The 30% apple cut increases the software prices for the end user or prevents a software for even coming to the platform (thinking of skydrive here). That is bad for the end user.

About your second phrase now, you need to take into account the entire picture:

* If you plan to sell an app on Windows Store you will need Microsoft approval, no app will be published without that. Also, Microsoft will take 30% from your app price (until you make $20k, after which the cut is 20%).

* The only free market seems to be Google Play, after you pay a fixed fee you can publish your app. I'm sure even Google has the right to remove your app if you infringe the rules of your developer contract.

BSD's not Linux!

1) Ability to unlock or root your device to run any OS

2) Having access to an open App Ecosystem.

The GNU license doesn't help with either of this issues. There are plenty of GNU/Android devices shipped with locked boot loaders. And nothing is stopping Google from locking down their App Store like Apples except a different corporate policy.

Note: I barely use Apple or Microsoft, so the question is NOT rhetorical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X

There you will find:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sys...

"... Apple Inc.'s iOS and Mac OS X, with its Darwin base including a large amount of code derived from FreeBSD."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

"Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000."

Venomsnake's point very much seems to fall into the latter category - having devices that you need to jump through hoops, exploit holes etc, in order to be able to get full access to them is hardly a 'victory' for Linux (even if those devices are mostly running a form of Linux).

You seem to be trying to argue against this by saying those principles aren't important to most people. That may or may not be true - but regardless of that, it's not achieving what Linux set out to deliver.

Irrelevant: they may not _want_ it, but they have a _right_ to it.

> That if something is not 100%, exactly, totally, purely aligned to your personal vision it's fucking garbage, or worse, evil and bad.

Sometimes it _is_ evil and bad not to do exactly the right thing.

Me too, please stop making them. The fact that you don't care about owning things you purchase does not imply that the entire concept of owning things you purchase is stupid and nobody should talk about it.

(and I've put "security" in quotes because I know this is not "real security" what you get when you trade "full openness" for it, but it's generally a "good enough substitute for security" for the "average end users", as "real security" is only possible if you are either willing and skillful enough to be responsible for it yourself or pay top dollars to get it tailored for your needs, so it's not an option for 99.9%)

For one I am very displeased that I have three choices of web, html5(ie phone gap apps) and native platforms. I think web should seamlessly integrate into the mobile OS. At this point most of mobile OS software has been debugged and worked out. But web is still not the desktop on the mobile device. I think there is still an enormous place for innovation that can make appstore like infrastructure irrelevant.

Ubuntu can fix that, that would be a huge plus.

No. Just no. Anyone, anywhere, with minimal understanding of JS and HTML can pop out a web app mashup today that would have required a hoard of cash, servers, and developers a decade ago to build. Further, for pennies a month they can run and scale it on a 'cloud' service that would have been an investment of millions in the past.

The web and web apps are very open. Don't conflate it with copyright trolls and mobile walled gardens. Remember, much of HTML5 started from Konqueror, an OSS browser not belonging to a 'cabal of powerful organisations.'

I can't use a kinect with web apps without browser extensions because there is no 'open web standard' for the kinect (and probably never will be) and web apps can't talk to USB devices. The web locks developers into the limited set of functionality that the standards provide and the standards are tightly controlled by a small group of companies. On a real open platform anybody is free to create software that interacts with hardware (ideally with the users permission first) so you don't have to rely on the platform maintainers to bless support for certain things.

I'm glad you mentioned cloud services. From the users point of view they are the most locked down type of software of all. Your data is locked away from you. You can't even reverse a proprietary file format. They are usually closed source (and even if the source is available, you can't change the version that you actually use). You can't even reverse engineer a binary.

Native software was scaling up to millions of users before any marketing hack even came up with the term 'cloud'. You are confusing running a web app a decade ago with distributing software a decade ago. You certainly did not need hoards of cash and servers to distribute native software a decade ago. People 20 years ago were writing native software and distributing it to hundreds of thousands of people, and I can assure you the typical shareware author was not investing millions to do that.

>The web and web apps are very open.

Open until you wan't to do something that isn't allowed by the standards, and then you (and your users) are screwed. On HN we get a lot of submissions about people 'hacking' with web technologies, but nearly all of them are just making use of some new API that has been gifted to them by the browser creating overlords. Which is all well and good and there is nothing wrong with that, but it's not a substitute for hacking on the platform itself and doing things that the creators perhaps didn't want you to do.

The real test for an open platform: can it be self hosting? Can I write a web browser as a web app? Not without shunting all the real work to a separate machine that is not limited by the web sandbox.

[1] which also applies to nearly all of the evil native platforms that the web is supposedly freeing us from

Funny you should say that, because I have actually done this. You can get a driver for the kinect that makes the depth camera appear as a normal webcam, and the media api in the browser allows you to access the kinect depth webcam.

It took a second reading to realize that this comment was not intended to be humorous -- which makes it even more entertaining.

Also, in reply to your subsequent post, there are web browsers written in javascript, so your self-hosting capabilities are realized, as well as all your browser-Inception needs.

Really? Where?

Ubuntu is not going to fix anything anytime soon IMHO.