On Wed, 19 Mar 2014, noah.odonoghue@gmail.com wrote:
Namely that it would succeed because it wouldn't "marginalise" the poor carriers out of customising their device and that access to the filesystem would be "up to the individual manufacturer".
http://www.debian.org/social_contract Ubuntu is based on Debian. The Debian Social Contract has a section about no discrimination against fields of endeavor, that includes not preventing companies from making commercial devices based on Debian. There is nothing to prevent someone selling a locked down Debian system that prevents the user from accessing the filesystem as long as they make all the source code available. For a system that has no changed binaries the reseller can just refer users to the Debian web site to meet this clause. While locked down phones aren't appreciated by many Debian Developers we have no policy that prevents such things, and under Debian rules no DD can do anything about that. While actively supporting phone vendors in restricting their customers isn't a desirable thing (IMHO and probably most DDs agree) it's not unreasonable for a company to want to do this to make money. Canonical has a plan to become a profitable company. I think that having Canonical make money this way is a lot better than MS selling locked down Windows phones. For the Australian market it shouldn't matter so much as currently none of the Telcos are selling phones at good prices. For any phone that you want you can get it a lot cheaper from Kogan than from any bundled deal from a Telco. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/