Many of you surely know the Android operating system developed by Google. Maybe not everybody know it’s not fully free software.
This is why activists from LibrePlanet Italia and Software Freedom Law Center created a fully free software Android alternative called Replicant.
We don’t need only a libre Android but a libre Market too because Google Market is proprietary software.
We also need to look for all free software applications inside Google Market and this is where we are asking for your help.
We want to convince Google to fix an important bug of its Market application: it lacks a license information field. If every application listed in the market would have a license field, it would be a lot easier for us to look for free as in freedom software apps.
This is where you can help because there is already a bug opened about this.
Vote on this Android bug report here – http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3746 – and
try to convince Google to extend their market app with license information so that libre software can be filtered by users.
There is also some work to do to create a free software replacement for the Google Market application.
We already have some great code to start so contact me if you want to help free software in the new exciting mobile field.
Thank you as always for all your support and love.
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Great post, great objective, and great links
Thanks Graziano for doing what you do
Reddit link started –
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/cb8bc/help_us_tell_google_to_make_license_information/
Thank YOU Pat for your comment and support.
The free software community is really awesome. Lots of people are sharing the news on identi.ca, reddit, digg and so on. Amazing.
Thank you for all this love.
Together we are strong.
Keep fighting.
Great post!
i’d like to see Repilcant in action on my HTC phone
Hi fuzzygeek, thank you for your comment.
What model of HTC phone do you own?
Hi Graziano, Slide.me would probably be the best bet for an open markeplace app. I’ve asked about this and the code is available, it “just” needs enough interest.
Voting for Google Code issues won’t bring this very far.
Another option is adding an Android-specific category to the FSF directory:
http://directory.fsf.org
I asked about this on #fsf-member on Freenode but got no answers.
Let me know, maybe we can jumpstart this otherwise.
Hi Fabian and thank you for your comment.
I disagree.
I already did a free functioning repository of fully free software applications for android on this website.
I tested it and it functions so Apktor is the way to go.