[clug] Vaguely off topic: iPeds and other Android tablets - availability and comparisons to that Apple one

[Alex Satrapa]

On 05/08/2010, at 16:47 , Robert Edwards wrote:

> On 05/08/10 16:37, Alex Satrapa wrote:
>> … it's not FOSS free … 

> Yet another example of Apple and their accolytes muddying the waters as
> to what constitutes "free".

Yup, I sure muddied that up. Shame on me for being an acolyte of the great god Jobs! Damn "free" for having free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-unconstrained senses of the word! Perhaps the great god Stallman should have used a different word?

> If I want to develop apps for _my_ CPU in
> _my_ phone that _I_ purchased (assuming that I had one, which I don't)
> then I would need to pay money and sign up with "the man".

Apple has pointed out on many occasions that you can freely write your own Free software for the iPhone, and you don't even have to download their XCode toolkit to do it. The mechanism is HTML5 apps, which are different to HTML5 web sites because they use local storage and can work entirely off-line. You don't even have to buy one of their patent-encumbered devices to use HTML5, and your app will work equally well on all devices that support HTML5.

If you don't want to use HTML5 because it's not "code" that runs on your processor, you better not be using Perl or Python or Java or C++ or C - they're not "code" that run on your processor either!