Ubuntu Phone Carrier Advisory Group Announced 40
An anonymous reader writes "With the focus from Ubuntu on phones, seven carriers have signed onto their Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group including Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Telecom Italia, Korea Telecom, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, and SK Telecom. The group is designed for the carriers to let 'mobile operators shape Ubuntu's mobile strategy. Members receive advance confidential briefings and provide us with industry insight to ensure that Ubuntu meets their needs.'"
Looks like Ubuntu Phone is getting serious. Mark Shuttleworth writes about their first meeting: "We mapped out our approach to the key question I’ve been asked by every carrier we’ve met so far: how can we accommodate differentiation, without fragmenting the platform for developers? We described the range of diversity we think we can support initially, received some initial feedback from carriers participating immediately, and I’m looking forward to the distilled feedback we’ll get on the topic in the next call. CAG members get a period of exclusivity in their markets."
Inevitable truth (Score:4, Interesting)
Mark Shuttleworth writes about their first meeting: "We mapped out our approach to the key question I’ve been asked by every carrier we’ve met so far: how can we accommodate differentiation, without fragmenting the platform for developers?"
To which he added "Fragmentation or lack of differentiation, please pick one and we can move on."
Re:American Carrier Support (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, don't worry about that. They've already got fiber optic splitting in the areas between Facebook, Yahoo!, Skype, Google, Microsoft, etc. and their respective Internet service providers. There's not as much need for a backdoor in the user/client side when practically all of the communications between these companies and their users are under constant surveillance and being sent in to top-secret NSA-controlled data gathering server rooms.
Why pander to the carriers? (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize that none of these carriers are in the US so that may very well be the difference here... BUT!!! Why pander to the carriers? What we need is open source in phones in a way that enshrines the consumer first. GPLv3 all the phone specific software so that it CAN'T BE TIVO'IZED and corrupted and used against the owner of the device. I'm all for people getting paid if they want to be paid for their work, but it will in no way ever justify locking me out of my own devices in any way or using my devices against me in any way. Remote software removal by anyone other than the owner? Nunh-Unh. Locking me into a market and excluding others? Nunh-Unh.
Re:Inevitable truth (Score:4, Interesting)
Debian seems to handle it OK. The same Debian repositories can make an awesome desktop machine, a rock solid server, a single purpose kiosk, or an HTPC. And all this software is written in a variety of languages and runs on a variety of hardware.
Re:Why pander to the carriers? (Score:4, Interesting)
All we really need at this point is the drivers. Nexus devices already offer what you want assuming you remove the google market, or just break that functionality.
Hardware folks seem pretty hesitant to provide drivers or even information to make them at this point.