It’s about “code revenue” vs “services revenue”. If I can’t sell you a copy of Office 97, well, obviously that pushes things to the Office 365 model. And the unfortunate reality is that a huge amount of important code is now GPL, which means a huge amount of the world’s codebase is now un-monetizable in that sense. This has fueled a massive push for “alternative revenue”, and the whole google model has been that the "alternative source" is advertising dollars.
Moreover, GPL itself has conditioned people that the right price for software is “free”. And obviously software is not free to produce, nor is the ecosystem of phones conductive to the Linux “hardware bazaar” model in the same way as 1990s era IBM-compatible PCs. [0]
Well, if the only valid price for consumer-facing software is “free”, and a huge amount of the software in the world is now un-monetizeable in the sense of being able to sell a copy of the software to fund your R&D effort… obviously that just pours gas on the fire of the tivo’ization and SaaS revenue models. That is a correct business-development response to the changing market conditions.
GPL has essentially forced the collapse of the traditional “fee for source” or “fee for binary” model. I think it probably would have been out-competed by service revenue eventually anyway, given that consumers obviously prefer “free” to paying money, but basically this is an accelerationism thing whereby GPL has more or less collapsed the entire proprietary-software market (to the extent that many people now view hardware that doesn’t have open drives as being somehow fundamentally bad or illegitimate), driving everyone into the arms of the SaaS providers. It has accelerationism’d us right into tivo’ization.
Big “my neighbor’s cats keep getting eaten by coyotes and he says that he just goes to the shelter and gets another cat and I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and his daughter started crying” energy. Like GPL literally has been so successful that people think proprietary software is illegitimate… except for the “free” ones backed by advertising dollars.
GPL has been feeding consumers to the coyotes. It doesn't mean they meant to do it, but, functionally by killing fee-for-software models and by conditioning everyone that the only valid price is "free", that's what it's kinda done. Proprietary software still exists... you just don't pay with money anymore.
I am of course human too, I groan at the thought of paying $350/year for a personal jetbrains license or paying $1000 more for an apple laptop than a comparable commodity one... but software costs money to develop and you make your choices about what is worthwhile and which relationships you want to accept enshittification on. My point is just that transactionality (ie, you pay money and receive a service) is actually a good thing, because those services are much less likely to enshittify if it's going to come at the expense of actual paying customers rather than just some livestock waiting to be sheared. It changes the nature of the relationship.
It doesn't mean there aren't bad companies that do enshittification anyway, but if the expectation is pay money => receive good, then obviously you can reasonably hold expectations about the nature of what you're going to receive, vs GPL and proprietary models fostering the "it's free, why are you complaining" mindset. GPL and SaaS models are alike in that respect and GPL has both directly reinforced that mindset, and also pushed far more companies to SaaS far more quickly with its own success.
[0] (Wireless+modems have specific regulatory requirements that are inherently incompatible with open-licensing, it is illegal to release a wireless chipset which is capable of violating local band-regulation requirements, which functionally imposes the requirement that devices listen to the local band to detect weather radar upon bootup to see if they're allowed to use the band in a given locality. This is part of why modern routers are so slow to boot up! And to prevent tampering/replacement, this effectively must be put in a closed blob to pass certification. Which is why projects like OpenWRT are struggling with Wifi 6E/6GHz and other newer hardware - when I checked maybe a year ago, there were zero 6E devices supported. And unfortunately, it is not possible to make a very good phone without wireless connectivity. It literally is one of the most challenging domains to try and go open-license on because the FCC ain't playin'.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134905
--
Outlawing this "contra-revenue"/ad-supported moel is low-key one of the biggest things the EU could tackle though. Big problem, wide problem.
Granted they're walking down that path with GDPR dismantling a lot of the worst of the surveillance capitalism, and with forcing Android to have actual reasonable OS support lifespans... they are gradually forcing these externalities/defects to be priced in properly. But I think it is explicitly worth stating as an end-goal: transactionality and fee-for-service or fee-for-product is a good thing, because then companies are competing to service customers and not competing for more livestock to be the product.
If you want to stop enshittification, get rid of contra-revenue models. The thing you are paying for, should be profitable to produce at the price you sell it. If you have engineering effort that's shared with other products: fine, amortize/attribute it however makes sense. But if you are selling a widget that costs $10 to produce for $9, on the expectation of $3 of revenue: no, that should be illegal.
If nothing else it's a competition issue, you can't have "honest" firms ever break this situation if you have other companies "dumping" and selling below-actual-cost. It is really no different from any other kind of dumping.
Otherwise, the advertising-supported companies will always be able to out-compete the "honest" companies, so it will always be a race to the bottom.
--
anyway, as far as hardware startups specifically: those exist and they just haven't gotten any traction. Fairphone, pinephone, lightphone, etc. These inevitably end up getting very little traction among enthusiasts etc. I don't think the existence of these solves any real problem with the android ecosystem.
Also, ecosystem is a major factor in OS adoption. Like you could go run MenuetOS right now, so why don't you? Ecosystem and network effect and available codebase etc. So these hardware startups have to work within the existing OS ecosystems etc - almost all of these startups are android and the ones that aren't, frankly are doomed. Consumers don't want featurephone or phone-specific app stores in 2024, especially for some niche product with no actual apps released for it. There is very little point to making a custom OS from vxworks or whatever, that's not where the problem lays here.
Similarly: Framework and System76 are attempting to thread that needle of supported hardware+OS configurations on "generic linux". This exists, just not to massive success or fanfare or changes in how the world works. And they're not re-engineering the OS. Even System76/PopOS is based on ubuntu iirc. Jumping to MenuetOS or other completely-new-OS things is a whole other can of worms.
Despite Framework/System76 existing, the world still runs on Windows 11 ad-supported installs or free Linux labor. So I don't know why it would be different for phone hardware+android.
