Linux Users & Developer convinced the esteemed Jon “Maddog” Hall to write the main feature in the relaunch issue due on sale July 30. You can read this excerpt until you can get your hands on a copy…

Forty years ago, in 1969, I started programming. I have made no secret over the past forty years that without access to what has now become known as “Free Software”, I would not have been able to be a programmer.
For a while, in the period of 1977 to 1994, the computer industry lost its way with the plethora of closed-source, proprietary software which limited the value that integrators can bring to a business solution. Since the advent of the Free Software movement, the tide seems to be turning, and people are not understanding that “Free Software” means “Software Freedom”, and that by using Free Software they now have control of the software that controls their business.
Now we have another great opportunity, in the realm of telephony. For a very long time we were told that we could have our telephone in any colour we wanted, as long as it was black. Then various governments broke up the monopolies of the large telephone companies to create “competition”. Unfortunately that “competition”, while offering choice of plans and phones, bound us to other fixed programs and “closed source”.
A couple of years later, cellular technology promised the freedom to move about and to access your calls, and later your data. But you were still bound to particular vendors, phones and plans. The phone, even though you bought it, did not belong to you.
Today, on the year of the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, it is time to cast off the chains of telephonic slavery and embrace telephonic freedom.
Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have heard of the Android operating system. Developed by a consortium of companies (”The Open Handset Alliance”), Android has been released in source code form and is now being ported to different handset models. A fully functional operating system based on the Linux kernel, it allows a hardware device to be a fully functional computer as well as a telephone.
Android as an open operating system promises in the long term that phones from
any hardware vendor may be able to have Android ported to them. What does this mean to the VAR, the ISV or the customer?
To the VAR and ISV, it means that the work done to create a solution for the customer has the maximum potential for reaching those customers. Customers will have a choice of many, many handsets with many features and prices to meet their needs. Nothing stops the code from going onto a hardware platform other than the porting effort.
Due to the virtual machine environment of Android, applications written for one Android platform should work on all of them.
Assuming that customers keep their Android operating system up to date, when new phones come out with new capabilities, all of the customer’s applications and data should be able to transfer over to the new phone without any effort.
In fact, when used in combination with managed services such as Google Apps, this “migration” of applications, contacts, data and other “phone information” might be truly “automatic”.

The old phone, by the way, could be refurbished and re-sold, perhaps at a lower price, to help reduce the cost of ownership of the new phone. Having an open operating system would allow the old phone to maintain some value.
In closed operating systems, when the manufacturer loses interest in maintaining the phone, the handset is as good as dead.

There is “open”, and there is “Open”

The Android system came out first on a phone from HTC, and was distributed by T-Mobile. Unfortunately, while Android was covered under the Apache License the phone system was not really “Free”. The phone, as it was available from T-Mobile, was locked to their service, and (using a signed version of the object) would not boot other operating systems nor even other updates of Android, unless it came from T-Mobile. Furthermore for some strange reason known only to T-Mobile and HTC, the phone (which had 802.11 capabilities) had no VoIP client that was distributed with it. Was this because T-Mobile was afraid the VoIP client would take away business from its cellular network?
Developers, wishing to help improve Android, were forced to buy an “unlocked, free” G1 directly from the Android site, and these were limited one per developer (where the developer had to register with the site). Not exactly a process for Value Added Resellers (VARs) or ISVs that wanted to deploy solutions to their customers. Likewise the VAR or ISV needs the cooperation of the vendor to easily add their applications to the phone through a “marketplace”.
This is not “Open”, or “Free”.
There is an alternative, and that is the Openmoko phone. Started as a project a couple of years ago, the goal of the Openmoko phone is to create a hardware handset that is completely “Open”.

You can read this article in its complete form in the relaunch issue of Linux User & Developer on sale 3 July