But you don't need to sign this agreement if you don't include Google apps on any of your devices. That's the point. Amazon, Ubuntu, Firefox all build AOSP devices without Google apps. It can be done. Of course, the hard part is making your own services and apps layer on them that makes it something people would want to use.

What Acer violated was the Open Handset Alliance agreement, something different than the agreement discussed here. Again, you don't have to belong to the Open Handset Alliance to fork Android. Acer did, so they got called on violating it. But you do not need to sign onto it to produce Android devices.

No, Google has no problem with anyone forking Android. What they don't want is people taking the Google Play Store, Google apps, but supplanting them with others, like Samsung has done.

Android itself was built to be forked. It literally is a platform to build other platforms.

The Google apps and Play Store are a different thing entirely.

Right. And he pointed out that there's nothing that says you have to license those apps. You can build a perfectly good, workable Android phone that has zero Google apps on them. This agreement has nothing that stops you from doing that.

Yup. It's also going to make life more difficult for Amazon and Samsung. But to me, this is a plus for most people who use the Android product, at least in the US.

It says that Samsung can't put its crap SVoice in place of Google Voice Search or ChatOn in place of Hangouts as defaults if they also want to include YouTube or the Play Store. It pretty much says that Amazon will have to buy into Google apps lock, stock, and barrel if it ever wants to bring back Google Search or enable Google Maps on Kindle Fire devices. As for Microsoft, it says that if they are even considering doing an Android phone, they'll have to build out their own ecosystem of apps and services unless they're okay with Google apps to be front and center. The services are a huge part here, if you don't think so, consider that Amazon effectively built their own workalike version of Google Services, and even that's pretty back level now, but was an essential part of making Kindle Fire somewhat successful. Personally, I think it would be very cool if Microsoft did an MS build of Android apps. They're the most likely company to actually do it well, but I'd be surprised if their stockholders had the intestinal fortitude to take that risk. We'll see.

As an Android user, I'm actually pleased with this decision because while I personally like Samsung phones, I hate the crap that passes for Google workalike apps on it. It's also high time that Google uses some of its own might to bring some order to the Android universe.

True lovers of pure Android can keep building on it. They are welcome to build on its open platform, and build their own apps. More power to them if they can build Search, Maps, video service, etc. that are on par with Google's. That would be great. Competition is good. But cherry picking Google apps or including outdated versions or worse, cheap imitations is not good.

No. Google never, ever said that their apps are open.

Android is open, not Google apps.

Wrong. That's not what this agreement says. Android is still open and OEMs are free to build out AOSP with their own apps.

What this says is that if you take the Google apps, you must include the whole package under the terms specified. That's all.

Sooo many posts here written by people who didn't actually read the article.

That's the beauty of this agreement. The apps are not being tied to Android. OEMs are free to build upon pure Android if they want and they can do so without including any of the Google apps at all. What this agreement states is that *if* they include the Google apps, they must take the package in its entirety and under the conditions specified.

There are some who would argue that Android isn't really Linux, but it certainly is a derivative of it. So, you've seen it running on 80% of the world's smartphones. It's also in ChromeOS which is starting to gain a bit of traction.

Every time someone tries to come out with a graphical means for programming, the problem becomes that deploying things in the field in a manner that they can be serviced becomes difficult.

Eventually, you find you want to be able to log or trace stuff and that's just best done using plain text Log or Trace statements.

Then, scaling becomes the issue. Yeah, maybe your program with 10 or so boxes and 20 arrows looks great but eventually you'll want to do something that maybe requires a few thousand boxes and arrows. Now, suddenly all that picture based stuff becomes a bit unwieldy. You'll break it into reusable parts no doubt but arranging them requires naming and naming boils down to some text of some sort.

Bwahahahaha!

Not so much. Got my best job offers at 45 and 48, took 'em both! There are a lot of companies that pay big money for experienced programmers, especially ones that can point to actual products they had a hand in.

But if it makes you feel better to believe that, go ahead.

Every story I read about this execution seems to have a different amount of time quoted. I've seen 10, 15, 20, and finally 25 minutes quoted from the New York Daily News. Do I hear 30 minutes?

It's hard to get all rattled up about this without some verifiable facts.

We have a couple of aging Windows laptops in our house but they are slowly getting replaced by Chromebooks and tablets. There's just nothing that we run on Windows that absolutely 100% demands Windows. We're using Mint instead of Quicken now, that was the last Windows thing we used. On the Chromebooks, the kids use Google Docs or Microsoft's own cloud based Office when it is absolutely called for. They have yet to hand in an assignment this year where the teacher could tell what source program was used.

The Windows laptops are used mostly for browsing and there's one that my husband keeps around because his work VPN is on it, but he hasn't used it in so long, he's not entirely sure the password is up to date. We also have one Macbook that gets a little usage.

Even so, it's much more likely that if we ever buy an actual full on computer, it would more likely be a Macbook Air rather than a Windows PC. Just never warmed up to the Metro look at all. I tried it and it looked ugly and busy to me whereas the Mac look is still familiar and simple.

This is about the stupidest strategy I can imagine. Ignore the high-earning techies and market yourself to "normal", presumably lower earning people?
If I was a stock holder for Yahoo, I'd be dumping it big time now.

Doesn't iOS7 allow for multiple accounts? Sad if it doesn't.

Time to get a new GP. Hopefully that person also had power of attorney to do so.