[luisml77]

The discussion between open-source and closed-source is essentially a discussion between communism and capitalism.

Anything that reaches a certain threshold of value to society and requires enormous effort to build and maintain has to fall back to a capitalist, for-profit, closed-source structure. That's all that's happening here.

Of course, small stuff like a software library that doesn't require much effort to build and doesn't provide much value can remain open-source. I personally think this obsession with open-source software is simply an obsession with communism and getting things for free, and not wanting getting rewarded for the value of the stuff you build, etc.

[pietro72ohboy]

> I personally think this obsession with open-source software is simply an obsession with communism and getting things for free, and not wanting getting rewarded for the value of the stuff you build, etc.

Except that both platforms (iOS as well as Android) were either born out of OSS or are still reliant on active development in such projects. They created nothing, they took something from the commons, polished it and are now rent-seeking. It was tolerated till they threatened to choke all competition and trap and rent-seek the entire world with their duopoly.

[luisml77]

> they threatened to choke all competition and trap and rent-seek the entire world

They did so legally and didn't break any rules. This is the game of capitalism, and the fact is, IOS and Android are extremely well built and developed, and no open-source project would ever come close to the hundreds of thousands of paid engineers that built IOS and Android.

You can either have capitalism and IOS and Android, or you can have communism and a society that is 10+ years behind in development. Do you really want to give up IOS 26 for a blackberry?

[qwertox]

Ah, yes, the library named Linux.

[luisml77]

Linux, even though you may think is a massive project and you may be right in some regards, doesn't require massive amounts of capital, human resources and paid developers, etc. to build it.

Android on the other hand is developed by thousands of engineers and is a much larger project in terms of monetary investment than Linux. Linux was essentially built by a single guy. Android could never have been built by a single person or even a open-source project. It's too massive.

However complex you think Linux is, its just a kernel and doesn't require a conglomerate to build and maintain for billions of users. Android does, and those developers need to get paid for the massive value they provide.

[fyrecean]

What about this is communism vs capitalism? Or even closed vs open source. There are billions of android devices in people's hands. Requiring a centralized authority to authorize what code people get to run on their own devices has nothing to do with a free market economy. This is a private entity telling us it's not safe to run code on our own computers without their approval.

Linux doesn't need a for profit company gate keeping it to ensure it is safe and secure. And even Windows doesn't prevent you from running any executable you choose from the internet. Why are phones treated differently?

[luisml77]

Because everyone in this comment section is arguing that Android should be open-source and detached from Google. I'm saying some things are simply too big to be built by the community.

The developers need to get paid. And the developers only get paid if the system is closed-source such that the revenue can only flow back to Google which is where the developers are hired at. In other words, yes it needs to be centralized, and the reason is the money required to build Android is just too much and therefore needs to be developed under a for-profit capitalist organization like Google.