First, let me apologize for making my email sounds like fact. Much of it
was unconfirmed opinions. Opinions that are based on trends of other "open"
hardware projects, but trends can always be broken. Worse still, it can
only be proven true or false once OUYA gets released and people start
playing playing with it. It was bad form to make it sounds like fact.
Here is my rebuttal, and in true debate form, is the last thing I am
allowed to say on this topic.
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 4:08 PM, bryanturley wrote:
You don't need usb to run adb it works fine over ip and the ouya has
ethernet and wifi.
It has other usb ports they just don't run in client mode (forget the real
name)
The 1000+ dev versions they released were incomplete versions of the
hardware and software the system doesn't release till march.
In the release video they pointed out things that they knew were going to
change already.
The mini usb was probably added to this one time only run of dev machines
because things are not 100% stable yet.
ADB over ethernet won't let you fix a non-booting device, unless the boot
loader is very smart. Possible, but unlikely. If you brick the boot loader,
your going to need direct access for sure. So someone releases a really
cool rom, and an unexperienced user bricks the device, he/she will most
likely have to get deeper then the exterior allows.
They have stated that rooting the os will not void the warranty, which is
the opposite of every other android device I have seen.
This is indeed what they stated, but they are only talking about hardware,
though they never said that explicitly. Here is an example of why: If I
install a custom rom, and the USB host ports stop working; they will only
honor the warranty if I flash it back to the stock OS, because its the only
way to know if the unsupported software is the problem, or the actual
hardware.
I had a mortola atrix, one of the more restrictive android phones, with a
custom rom. A section of the screen stop responded to touch. If I returned
the phone as it, they surely would have laughed at me, and made me buy a
new one. So I restored to the stock OS, and then returned the phone. They
were able to verify the problem, and replaced the phone. Essentially the
same thing OUYA would most likely do.
That said what OUYA is doing is good for the open source community. They
are legalizing software changes, so people don't have to hide and cover it
up if the hardware fails. However, anyone who has launched a product will
tell you, support is the hardest part. And there is no feasible way that
they can support the software once you make a change.
gofmt and related forced styles bring consistency to the presentation of
go code, would you say it isn't open because of that?
So thats a bit of a stretch from what I was saying. There is no requirement
on using them, gofmt even always you to change how it formats code, without
modify its code. But lets continue this bad metaphor. Imagine if the go
compiler wouldn't compile your code because you used four spaces instead of
hard tabs. Nothing is wrong with the code, but the compiler won't accept it
because it doesn't like the way it looks. This is similar to market
curation, ability to block apps for arbitrary reasons. Is the apple store
open?
locking users out of root that don't need it while providing an easy way
to get it if you do isn't really a problem.
it worked very well on maemo.
Again, I don't see how this is different from most android
phones. Especially android phones that are sold by google. The G1 for
example allowed `adb root` right off that bat. That just gave you a root
shell. Of course that became a security concern, which is why it has become
a bit harder, but not very.
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