Free Software on Android

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Dec 28, 2011, at 1:18 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:

> I think that there are things that can be done on both points, and I  
> wonder
> what other people think:


IMHO the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad drives the Android market. People  
invest large sums of money developing apps for iOS and if they are a  
success, the developers port them to Android.

There is nothing to stop anyone from developing a free app for Android  
but there currently is a high cost of entry into the market, the price  
of the device. As Android devices go down in price, and more people  
have them, more people will start developing apps for them.

It was that way with Linux too, device drivers only existed for those  
devices standard on a commodity PC. If someone in the Linux community  
had a different device and wanted to write a driver, they would, and  
many of them were written by amateurs (and performed accordingly).

Eventually device manufacturers found that while only a small portion  
of computers ran linux, it was enough to provide a few samples and  
some documents to people who were willing to write the device drivers.

In your case, you have the device, you can obtain the development kit  
and the market account, feel free to develop something. Maybe you have  
that right combination of abilities to produce an app that people want.

As for making money on Emacs and ls, well, Emacs was hardly a  
revolutionary product, it was just another text editor in a field of  
lots of text editors, that just sort of grew. There are many text  
editors available for Linux and I doubt that most Linux users don't  
use it. I know for sure that most UNIX users don't.

Ls on the other hand was basically a copy of the BSD ls, which was a  
copy of UNIX's ls, which was a copy of the file listing command on one  
of many timesharing systems, that went back to the early 1960's.

Actually, considering that RMS has made a reasonable living with the  
FSF, he did figure out how to market Emacs. :-)

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(