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A Buggy Mir Shown Running Unity 8 On Ubuntu Touch

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  • #41
    Originally posted by dee. View Post
    You can ship without Google apps, but then it won't be an Android(TM) device.
    Yes it will. You can use the Android trademark without shipping the Google apps.

    Originally posted by dee. View Post
    Play may also be a frontend, but it is still part of what you need to get the Android(TM) experience, what people expect from an Android(TM) phone.
    People expect a package manager frontend, but there's nothing to stop companies from developing their own frontend.

    Originally posted by dee. View Post
    Amazon Kindle is not a non-Android project. It still uses Android, just not Android(TM). If that's the only example you can think of, that's not very good. In contrast, glibc is used by pretty much every Linux distro in existence, and Wayland is going to be used by pretty much every regular desktop Linux DE (except Unity), in addition to both Tizen and Wayland. They're both also developed with an open development model, in a way that benefits multiple OS's (even competing ones), not just one OS like Android.
    If you ignore every Android-derivative like Kindle and Cyanogenmod, and the hundreds of other Andriod custom ROM projects, then of course there are fewer projects using SurfaceFlinger. There is a guy who has ported Dalvik to run on Ubuntu though, and he's announced that SurfaceFlinger is next (yes, the "Android only" Dalvik is coming to the Linux desktop!). UbuntuTouch was using SurfaceFlinger too at one point, not sure if they still do. I think bionic is used in some embedded projects, and there is a Bionic Gentoo portage tree that uses it, so it is being used elsewhere.

    As for Alien Dalvik being closed source... tbh, I don't really care even if it is, but do you have a source for that claim?
    It's a proprietary 3rd party product that Jolla is licensing. You don't care that Sailfish is going to ship with a closed source app stack and runtime?

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    • #42
      distro-targets are the key to understanding the display-manager-timeline, methinks

      Originally posted by blackout23 View Post
      Wasn't the initial plan to have Mir on the UbuntuTouch images since May?
      I assume you mean May'13, and are prolly talking about the did-not-make-it crowd-funded Ubuntu phone? But I thought that came later.

      Anyways, as I understand it, the historical Ubuntu plan was to have a basic version of wayland deployed in 9 to 12 months, in time for the initial release or immediate aftermath of Unity during 2011. That was the year when the first android-flavored-version of wayland came out, but then all the android patches were withdrawn from the wayland source-tree.

      The new mir-oriented ubuntu plan, which started internally sometime around mid-2012, is to get mir into the wild, so that there is some beta-testing by a significant number of users running frontline ubuntu, so that by the time Ubuntu 14.04 LTS rolls around early next year, they will be able to put Mir on it as an 'option' which will probably become 'default' by the time 14.04.pointRelease2 comes out, and 'mandatory' as of 14.04.pr3.

      By contrast, RHEL/CentOS version 7 is coming out in a couple months, and seems unlikely to have wayland. Maybe the optional RedHatSoftwareCollections stuff will offer wayland for RHEL 7, over the course of the next decade or so? (With luck it will be backported to RHEL/CentOS 6 also... not sure if they will do the same for RHEL5, which is a 2.6.32 kernel, but the EOL for those boxen is 2020 or something... a long time!)

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      • #43
        Originally posted by chrisb View Post
        Yes it will. You can use the Android trademark without shipping the Google apps.
        Does anyone do that? Source? I'm not convinced.

        People expect a package manager frontend, but there's nothing to stop companies from developing their own frontend.
        No, but developing things costs money. Especially proprietary things that can't take advantage of open source code. Also, then they won't be able to use Google's app store, either, and that happens to be the primary marketplace for Android apps.

        If you ignore every Android-derivative like Kindle and Cyanogenmod, and the hundreds of other Andriod custom ROM projects, then of course there are fewer projects using SurfaceFlinger.
        Of these, only Kindle is one that is being actually shipped on devices. The others are pretty much hobbyist projects, which people have to install on their own. Even so, they're all derivatives of Android, so of course they use the same display server and libc. There are, however, no non-Android systems that would use Bionic or Surfaceflinger.

        There is a guy who has ported Dalvik to run on Ubuntu though, and he's announced that SurfaceFlinger is next (yes, the "Android only" Dalvik is coming to the Linux desktop!).
        Yes, great, and we still don't have even one device that ships with Ubuntu Touch. And who knows when or if we ever get to see one, either. Anyways, just because someone ports something to some OS doesn't mean it's being used there. Ubuntu Touch is planning to use Mir, not SF.

        UbuntuTouch was using SurfaceFlinger too at one point, not sure if they still do.
        That's only because the early versions were based on Android (more specifically, Cyanogenmod). Not sure if they still are, but probably that won't be the case in the final version, since they intend to use Mir and not SF.

        I think bionic is used in some embedded projects, and there is a Bionic Gentoo portage tree that uses it, so it is being used elsewhere.
        Elsewhere? Can you name names? Which OS's are using Bionic?

        It's a proprietary 3rd party product that Jolla is licensing. You don't care that Sailfish is going to ship with a closed source app stack and runtime?
        Where on that page does it say it's closed source? They don't give many details there.

        And no, I don't care, any more than I care about all the proprietary apps that ship with Android. The Android runtime emulator runs in userland, and all the Android apps will IIRC be running sandboxed in Sailfish, so it's no real security risk. And no one forces you to use Android apps, anyway. It's an extra feature that is being offered, and if it's closed source I'm sure that's only because there are no open source alternatives available.

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        • #44
          Originally posted by dee. View Post
          Does anyone do that? Source? I'm not convinced.


          What does "compatibility" mean?

          We define an "Android-compatible device" as one that can run any application written by third-party developers using the Android SDK and NDK. We use this as a filter to separate devices that can participate in the Android app ecosystem and those that cannot. Devices that are properly compatible can seek approval to use the Android trademark. Devices that are not compatible are merely derived from the Android source code and may not use the Android trademark.

          In other words, compatibility is a prerequisite to participate in the Android apps ecosystem. Anyone is welcome to use the Android source code. But if the device isn't compatible, it's not considered part of the Android ecosystem.

          What is the role of Google Play in compatibility?

          Devices that are Android compatible may seek to license the Google Play client software. This allows them to become part of the Android app ecosystem, enabling their users to download developers' apps from a catalog shared by all compatible devices. This option isn't available to devices that aren't compatible.
          So in other words, licensing the play store and licensing the trademark both require certification as compatible, but there is no indication using the trademark requires using the play store.

          Originally posted by dee. View Post
          Of these, only Kindle is one that is being actually shipped on devices. The others are pretty much hobbyist projects, which people have to install on their own. Even so, they're all derivatives of Android, so of course they use the same display server and libc. There are, however, no non-Android systems that would use Bionic or Surfaceflinger.
          Cyanogenmod is shipping on an upcoming smartphone.

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          • #45
            Originally posted by TheBlackCat View Post
            http://source.android.com/source/faq...atibility-mean

            So in other words, licensing the play store and licensing the trademark both require certification as compatible, but there is no indication using the trademark requires using the play store.
            But in practice, are there anyone who actually use this possibility? Are there any Android(tm) devices that don't come with Play?

            Cyanogenmod is shipping on an upcoming smartphone.
            Well good for them.

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            • #46
              Originally posted by dee. View Post
              But in practice, are there anyone who actually use this possibility? Are there any Android(tm) devices that don't come with Play?
              Don't know, and it isn't relevant. You said "You can ship without Google apps, but then it won't be an Android(TM) device." That is factually incorrect.

              Originally posted by dee. View Post
              Well good for them.
              Again, you said "Of these, only Kindle is one that is being actually shipped on devices." That isn't correct. It is also ignoring that the Nook HD line runs android as well.

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              • #47
                Originally posted by TheBlackCat View Post
                Don't know, and it isn't relevant. You said "You can ship without Google apps, but then it won't be an Android(TM) device." That is factually incorrect.
                We don't really know for sure, until Google approves a device without Google play to use the Android TM. Google hasn't explicitly stated that they'd approve this, and they've been disapproving of Android derivatives that deviate too much from Google's "vision" in the past... see: Aliyun OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyun_OS

                Again, you said "Of these, only Kindle is one that is being actually shipped on devices." That isn't correct. It is also ignoring that the Nook HD line runs android as well.
                If you want to get anal about it, then yes, it actually is correct: of those mentioned only the Kindle is being shipped, as in, right now. There may be talk or plans about a CM-preloaded device, but that isn't shipping yet as of now, so what I said wasn't incorrect. The Nook HD wasn't mentioned in the post I was responding to, either, and it wasn't my responsibility to bring it up (nor was it relevant to the subject at hand at the time).

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                • #48
                  Originally posted by dee. View Post
                  We don't really know for sure, until Google approves a device without Google play to use the Android TM. Google hasn't explicitly stated that they'd approve this, and they've been disapproving of Android derivatives that deviate too much from Google's "vision" in the past... see: Aliyun OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyun_OS
                  Except for the little issue that the Kindle Fire pages use the Android trademark a lot. I can't find any indication that Google has bothered them about this. So either they are breaking the law and Google is ignoring it, or they have permission. Either way it doesn't seem to be a major issue for Google.

                  Originally posted by dee. View Post
                  If you want to get anal about it, then yes, it actually is correct: of those mentioned only the Kindle is being shipped, as in, right now. There may be talk or plans about a CM-preloaded device, but that isn't shipping yet as of now, so what I said wasn't incorrect. The Nook HD wasn't mentioned in the post I was responding to, either, and it wasn't my responsibility to bring it up (nor was it relevant to the subject at hand at the time).
                  If you are going to get this pedantic, "If you ignore every Android-derivative like Kindle and Cyanogenmod", it was never limited to those exclusively.

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                  • #49
                    Originally posted by dee. View Post
                    No, but developing things costs money. Especially proprietary things that can't take advantage of open source code. Also, then they won't be able to use Google's app store, either, and that happens to be the primary marketplace for Android apps.
                    You don't need to develop anything proprietary. Android can install .apk files downloaded by the web browser - all you need to do to "make your own version of Play" is to host a web site and put the apk files there. You don't need a complicated frontend, you can just use the web browser. It's trivial. Amazon have their own Amazon Appstore for Android. You can install it on any Android device that supports sideloading or installs from non-Play sources. Amazon Appstore may not be as popular as Play but it does have over 100,000 apps, which is a lot. There are 36 different Appstores worldwide - Play may be the most popular but it is not a monopoly.

                    Originally posted by dee. View Post
                    Of these, only Kindle is one that is being actually shipped on devices. The others are pretty much hobbyist projects, which people have to install on their own. Even so, they're all derivatives of Android, so of course they use the same display server and libc. There are, however, no non-Android systems that would use Bionic or Surfaceflinger.
                    I already pointed out that there is a version of Gentoo that uses Bionic. You can load Gentoo onto any system you want. In fact, GCC supports Bionic as the default C library, so it shouldn't be that difficult to build any embedded Linux distribution using Bionic if you want. I think ChromeOS uses Bionic too, though I haven't checked.

                    Also, Android GPU drivers need Bionic (libhybris has a private Bionic). Mer uses libhybris, so Mer relies on Bionic:

                    http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl...1&cid=43430347
                    The SoC vendors are willing to target only Android
                    Android GPU drivers are built against Bionic libc
                    The GPU drivers talk to hardware, and expose themselves via EGL and GLESv2
                    EGL is basically a common API for GPU memory management, buffer (region of memory used for rendering) allocation and display updates
                    GLESv2 stands in for the functionality we commonly associate with OpenGL
                    GPU drivers form a combination of EGL and GLESv2 libraries, each GPU vendor providing their own

                    This is where libhybris comes into play. The GPU driver libraries don't work without Bionic libc - so libhybris, while running on top of regular linux (and thus [e]glibc), keeps a private Bionic libc open for the GPU drivers' use, and redirects all the EGL/GLESv2 calls to the GPU driver libraries. These libraries run in their own Bionic universe, and tell the actual display hardware what to do.
                    Originally posted by dee. View Post
                    Yes, great, and we still don't have even one device that ships with Ubuntu Touch. And who knows when or if we ever get to see one, either. Anyways, just because someone ports something to some OS doesn't mean it's being used there. Ubuntu Touch is planning to use Mir, not SF.
                    I said Ubuntu, not Ubuntu Touch. Dalvik is "fully working" on Ubuntu desktop. It doesn't really matter if a device ships with it or not, since it is trivial to install packages in Ubuntu.

                    Originally posted by dee. View Post
                    Elsewhere? Can you name names? Which OS's are using Bionic?
                    Gentoo-bionic. Also possibly ChromeOS and ChromeCast, I haven't checked.

                    Probably also the various "Android" runtime stacks like Alien Dalvik and Bluestacks - it would make a lot of sense to compile the Android runtime and link it against Bionic rather than going to the effort of porting Android to a native libc and dealing with all the incompatibilities, but of course they don't have to give out source, so it is harder to tell for sure.

                    Originally posted by dee. View Post
                    And no, I don't care, any more than I care about all the proprietary apps that ship with Android. The Android runtime emulator runs in userland, and all the Android apps will IIRC be running sandboxed in Sailfish, so it's no real security risk. And no one forces you to use Android apps, anyway. It's an extra feature that is being offered, and if it's closed source I'm sure that's only because there are no open source alternatives available.
                    So you criticise Android and Ubuntu for being "closed", but endorse a distribution that ships with an actual proprietary closed source software stack developed in secret by a commercial company. Seems contradictory.

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                    • #50
                      Originally posted by TheBlackCat View Post
                      Except for the little issue that the Kindle Fire pages use the Android trademark a lot.
                      There's also the whole "Amazon Appstore for Android". I am a bit surprised that Google hasn't enforced the Android trademark against Amazon, given that under US trademark law if they fail to enforce a trademark they can lose it.

                      edit: I guess Amazon could argue that the use of the trademark in "Amazon Appstore for Android" is entirely descriptive, but then the same logic could apply with "X Tablet for Android". Guess we won't find out what a court thinks unless Google decides to sue.
                      Last edited by chrisb; 26 September 2013, 09:16 AM.

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