Free Software on Android

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Nadav,

On Wed, 28 Dec 2011 14:25:45 +0200
Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 28, 2011, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Free Software on 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
> 
> Actually, the only cost of entry into Google's market is a one time fee
> of $25. I even suggested the possibility (that I have an itch to
> actually go ahead and do...) that one person pays this $25 once, and
> then uploads a bunch of free software from various people, using his one
> market account, making it appear on the main Android market and not the
> esoteric F-Droid market, and free for the free software writers.
> 
> The prices of the Android devices are low, and going down. I bought mine
> for $189. That's even cheaper than the cheapest desktop computer I ever
> bought (which was 1000 shekels, as I reported in this mailing list
> earlier this year).

Right.

> 
> > 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).
> 
> I could accept that Android are new, so there are still few apps for
> it. What bothers me more is that everywhere I look, I can find apps that
> people *have* written, but are either for-money or free-with-ads (which
> basically means they can't be open source, otherwise people can remove
> the ads). E.g., I looked for a Wikipedia browsing app, and found a nice
> one, but with ads, and of course not open source. What the ****??
> Thousands of people spent millions of hours writing this encyclopedia without
> making a penny, and this schmoe thinks he should make money by showing ads
> on their efforts?

Well, note http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html - I think we shouldn't
discourage Android FOSS developers from trying to sell their applications (as
long as they also provide the source, which means that other people can make
a gratis or non-ad-encumbered-or-whatever version.). A similar model has been
used by some FOSS-shareware such as Limewire (IIRC) or XChat for Windows, or
whatever.

> 
> Once someone publishes a real free-software app that (in this example)
> browses wikipedia, all the for-money or ad-filled applications will be
> forgotten, just like dozens of "shareware" text editors have gone the
> way of the dodo, but vi and emacs remain to this day.
> 

Well, many open source text editors have been practically forgotten as well,
and much more other open source apps. Some shareware or otherwise commercial
text editors appear to be doing pretty well so far, but they face an increasing
amount of competition from open-source text editors. 

> I'm also curious, are people making real money from this market? By "real"
> I mean something they can actually support themselves with, not $100 or
> even $1000. By "people" I mean a significant percentage of the app
> writers, not the top 1 percent successes like "Angry Birds". My guess is
> that people *think* they will make money this way, which is why they do
> it, but at the end most of them will make peanuts. It's like the
> "shareware" phenomenon of the 1990s.
> 

Well, many Android/iPhone developers are making a living from writing
applications for companies and web-sites who are interested in preparing
dedicated mobile applications, in addition to their web-sites. Since these
companies pay them for that, it's enough to make a living. Regarding selling
applications on the mobile applications' markets for profit, I also
believe (and there were some Slashdot posts about that to confirm) that most
such attempts, do not yield a substantial profit (long tail and all).

I recall posting this original video (actually a screencast) to YouTube and I'm
happy it received 2,248 views and 3 likes, which is nothing compared to the
millions or even > 100million that some videos receive, because I didn't do it
to become the next YouTube hit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHQ2bWGeYMg
 
> > 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.
> 
> I already wrote a tiny widget which I needed, and I based it,
> unsurprisingly, on some free software widget which I found. So the
> availability of free software on Android is very important for
> developers who want to learn - I just wish there were more of it.
> 
> And of course, before I can publish anything I did, I need to learn a
> bit more so I won't be ashamed of my code ;-) So far I only spent around
> a day on learning Android programming - but the result - of being able to
> program my own Linux-based mobile device - is very satisfying.
> 

I'm sure your code is in better condition than most of the code that beginning
programmers (and sometimes experienced ones) that I regularly review on
Freenode channels. I'm never ashamed to make my code viewable, and I've even
posted some code I've written in high school:

http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/nostalgia/

If they can do it, so can you.

> > 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.
> 
> Most android apps aren't revolutionary as well. Like I say, I found
> ad-supported Wikipedia apps (when one could just use a normal
> browser...), I saw an ad-supported memory game for kids (yeah, right, my
> 3 year old kid can actually read those ads...), and a lot of other
> mundane crap that isn't free software, but could have been. It took me a
> lot of effort to find an example free-software widget that I can build on -
> most of the fairly trivial widgets on the market are free, but their source
> is not available.

That's a shame. 

I'm not sure if Emacs was "revolutionary", in a sense, but I believe it
certainly pioneered many important innovations, that were later copied by a lot
of open-source and proprietary software. For example, Firefox was awarded an
innovation for its "search-as-you-type" feature, which had existed in Emacs and
similar editors for years.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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