E-Dribble

It’s been proven before, but Google keeps confirming that the only way that a free open source system or product  will dominate a closed source, proprietary commercial system is if the free open source system is being driven by a commercial, closed source and proprietary entity. Google’s Android system has overtaken the iPhone in sales.

It really isn’t much of a big deal when you take into account that getting into an iPhone is still much more expensive than a phone running Android.  Many people are choosing Android because they either can’t afford or don’t want to spend the money required to own an Apple product.  It hardly determines a superior product.

Who cares why it’s happening, right?  We should just be cheering that open source is finally trampling a proprietary product on it’s own turf!

Wait just a sec, you robe wearing, GNU-touting supernerd.  During it’s incredible rocket to popularity and stardom, Android is showing the world one of the main reasons open source sucks. Although I’ve made fun of it countless times, it seems that people are still surprised by the fact that if you have 400 versions of one thing with no interoperability planned into them, you spend much of your time frustrated by the fact that applications written for version 394 isn’t compatible with version 103.  In short, many applications written for Motorola’s Android doesn’t work with LG’s version of Android.  For that reason, consumers are growing wary that the Jones’ version of Android will be better than their own.  Unlike Apple’s OS, inequality abounds.

I have bigger things to worry about than this, however.  I’m working on creating a distrowatch site for the Android operating system so each phone owner can track the top five hundred versions of Google’s operating system in real time.  Given the linux user’s inability to see this as a huge shortcoming, it should be incredibly popular.