Stallman: Android free?
By Sumir Singh

The words guru and genius are sometimes used lightly. But there is almost universal agreement among the tech community that Richard Stallman has single handedly done more for the software sector that most.  Stallman has millions of fans for his tireless efforts on behalf of his Free Software Foundation. Harvard and MIT educated Richard Stallman initiated the GNU Project and in 1985, he founded the Free Software Foundation. 

Stallman travels the world campaigning for free software while arguing against software patents as he believes they are detrimental to the larger good of society. Techgoss had reported Stallman’s trip to Kerala last year.

Stallman’s has written an eloquent article querying is Android really free software? Google's smartphone code is often described as 'open' or 'free' – but when examined by the Free Software Foundation, it starts to look like something different.  After making valid points on how Android is not really free, Stallman concludes the article with

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Recent press coverage of Android has focused on the patent wars. During 20 years of campaigning for the abolition of software patents, we have warned such wars could happen. Software patents could force elimination of features from Android, or even make it unavailable. (See endsoftpatents.org for more information about why software patents must be abolished.)

However, the patent attacks, and Google's responses, are not directly relevant to the topic of this article: how Android products approach an ethically system of distribution and how they fall short. This issue merits the attention of the press too.

Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone, but there is a long way to go. Hackers are working on Replicant, but it's a big job to support a new phone model, and there remains the problem of the firmware. Even though the Android phones of today are considerably less bad than Apple or Windows smartphones, they cannot be said to respect your freedom.
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