I’m coming from a casual/moderate open source user’s perspective with a question:

Are all serious FOSS advocates high strung ninnies?

In my career as a journalist, I’ve encountered more haywire open source reactionaries than I’d like to deal with, and I’ve really begun to regard the whole group as a bunch of paranoid freaks.

There’s this ideology that turns into a stouthearted set of beliefs that gets in the way of logical discourse. I liken it to political radicals who call everyone who isn’t throwing molotov cocktails at the police a “fascist sympathizer.”

What am I talking about here? If you’re an Android fan, you know Cyanogen. It’s a modded Android ROM which has basically been feeding the public all of Google’s software updates before Google has had a chance to officially release them to the public. Google has finally issued a cease and desist warning to Cyanogen’s developer –also going by the moniker Cyanogen– that he has to cut it out because he’s distributing stuff not included in the open source licensing. As Google said yesterday in its blog, “Unauthorized distribution of this software harms us just like it would any other business, even if it’s done with the best of intentions.”

Suddenly the open source reactionaries cry foul and mobilize a boycott of Android. To quote Phandroid’s article yesterday: “Google is basically moving the modding community from doing their work in the light to doing their work in the dark. Forget about getting ROMs on XDA-DEVS… Android builds are about to become torrents and warez.”

*sigh*

Can we please be civilized? I mean, you shouldn’t be surprised, Android has never been purely open source. Since it was first released last October, it has been a kind of hybrid licensing structure. There is the public development branch under the Apache 2.0 license and then stuff which is considered Google’s intellectual property which must be licensed out… I don’t know how minute the stuff that must be licensed is, and judging by the confusion of the community, the two may be too closely interwoven for many to discern where one ends and the other begins.

One commenter wrote: “The phones that are running Cyanogen’s ROMs ALREADY HAD THE GOOGLE APPS.”

However true this may have been in the past, in this case it is abundantly clear what the problem is. Cyanogen included the updated Android Market in his mod, which is fundamentally different from the app already on everybody’s phones, clearly crossing the line. In other words, the C&D is about Cyanogen distributing a closed-source app and not modding the Android platform.

What the community is getting upset over is that just because Google releases a free Android app, it does not mean it’s Free and Open Source. I’ve seen this throughout the message board commentary over the last few days. People assume that because YouTube, Gmail, Google Sync are not FOSS, that Android is now completely ruined.

The modding community is pissed because they now think this means they have access to basically none of Google’s awesome services, and HTC Sense and Motorola’s MOTOBLUR are illegal, and now they’re all abandoning the platform as tainted by corporate greed.

Now, I don’t know the ins and outs of the licensing structure, but it’s obvious that this reaction was way out of hand. I suggest we all sit down, pull the black bandannas off our faces and turn the talk about boycotts and protests into talk about what can and cannot be done with Android.

We don’t need Cyanogen to be a martyr for an insurrection.