Mozilla OS Looking Grown Up On Its Own Developer Phone 114
An anonymous reader writes "It's no secret that Mozilla has been working on a mobile OS. Previously codenamed Boot2Gecko, the project focused on a purely HTML5 based system that worked in many ways like current mobile devices. As the project grew into Mozilla OS, the company has laid out a partnership with ZTE that will have real world devices in certain markets early next year. Testing for this OS had previously consisted of a compiled ROM that would be flashed over a handful of Android devices. Now, Mozilla has moved into full fledged product evaluation mode with their own custom developer phone."
didn't they already announce something like this? (Score:4, Informative)
didn't they already announce something like this?
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/mozilla-dumps-boot2gecko-name-firefox-os-tktktk/ [wired.com]
the picture in this article sure as fuck looks like a reflashed android though! pretty full fledged, but that's zte for you..
Re:Three cheers for Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
From mozilla.org:
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet.
Re:Three cheers for Mozilla (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Three cheers for Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
Foundation handles the development. Corporation pays people and collects revenue. This is an artifact of tax law in the USA, Mozilla is still run by Foundation which is non profit.
Re:Browser Based OS (Score:5, Informative)
Say that again? You just look at the source code, the javascript and it's all there. Maybe not like you want it, but there is nothing intrinsic to browser apps that make them a sort of DRM. If it is written in HTML5, you can look at the code if they make it available - in fact in some ways you can do 'Show Source' in a browser easier than many native apps. Even Google Apps you can do 'Show source' in your browser. In a certain way the web is far more open that native apps, which are painfully difficult to disassemble from the binary.
The only real problem are the requests from the server - true, they don't often release server software source. But often this is mostly connection to some database. While this can be problematic for open source, it is not intrinsically so. Most web apps can also be written to work offline.