It could be profitable the way RHEL or the Mozilla Foundation is profitable.

Companies will pay for OS support, and companies will pay for access. Android as a foundation with a company selling OS support and services which could be rebranded would be profitable.

I’m thinking about the wider IoT space here beyond only mobile.

Chromium :3

Google bribes trump, agrees to place pro-trump search results higher. Nothing happens to Google.

I don't trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I'm kinda surprised Google didn't already gift an underage child to Trump so he'd make the problem go away.

However a perfectly viable option that I'm sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google's former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone's best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.

This wouldn't be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a "common good" is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.

What do you mean by "get"? Who will be funding the creation of all these OSes? The phone margins are already razor thin.

The primary ways in which the Mozilla Foundation earns money is through search partnerships, donations and grants. Guess who is the major contributor.

As for Red Hat, this comes down to subscriptions or enterprise offerings, neither which really apply to a consumer OS unless you're willing to pay a subscription fee out of pocket. I doubt there will be much to be earned from offering consulting or training, either, unless they make Android exceedingly confusing to use.

The only companies that would pay for Android are OEMs who are already making thin margins, and effectively it'd drive the price of non-iPhones up. The alternative is that OEMs take the Huawei option and fork AAOS and develop it at their own expense.

My interpretation of what the proponents of separating Android from Google are arguing is that it's exactly Google Play, Gmail, Google Maps and the other parts of GMS that must be uncoupled.

Google has said it didn't maintain a monopoly through such agreements and that consumers could change their device defaults to use other search engines.

It's not complete truth. I use librewolf because you can set search engine to custom. In chrome you can only pick from predefined. With this fact Google controls it's competition. You can't compete with monopoly by being invisible because they always watch you.

News from The Government!

Going forward you can now only search and browse the web by mail!

Isn't that great?

Some guy in the government.... I got another request for titties. Have we organized the titties files yet? The request is pretty clear... Larger than C cup but smaller than triple D.

The primary ways in which the Mozilla Foundation earns money is through search partnerships, donations and grants.

Yes. It’s the same thing with the Linux kernel and other large FOSS projects. There isn’t a perfect fit for Android, but it would be better than the way ASOP is run now.

As for Red Hat, this comes down to subscriptions or enterprise offerings, neither which really apply to a consumer OS unless you're willing to pay a subscription fee out of pocket.

Consumer devices ship with proprietary software which is licensed all the time. It could be a library or an entire OS. Consumers are not the target market, like consumers aren’t the target market for RHEL.

The prime example is Windows. It’s licensed to Dell or whomever and ships with the hardware. The license is baked in.

Some people might be willing to pay if the price is reasonable enough. Android has support for major vendors, so using it as a base would be a boon to people doing things like media boxes and signage.

I doubt there will be much to be earned from offering consulting or training, either, unless they make Android exceedingly confusing to use.

It’s the opposite. Make it easy to use. Companies pay for tools which reduces developer time.

The only companies that would pay for Android are OEMs who are already making thin margins, and effectively it'd drive the price of non-iPhones up.

The smaller OEMs would pay for licenses, PS hours, and backend services. They don’t have the expertise or budget.

Samsung? They’re going to keep doing what they’re doing because they have the expertise and budget to fork from upstream. It’s possible they would rally around Android, like companies have rallied around the Linux kernel.

OEMs do this with Linux already, so it would bring Android more inline with the norms.

Because Tim Cook gave Trump a trophy.

outdated news from may 2nd, in fact today a judge ruled that google won’t have to sell chrome or android, and they can keep paying mozilla/apple for being the default search engine

BUT, they will have to share search data publicly, and the default search engine deals can’t be exclusive anymore

Preferably something open source that fuckin corpos can't gatekeep and control.

"Sorry, we've all looked through those files a lot but no one has had time to alphabetize them yet!"