You have probably noticed a slashdotted article today about Debian running on Android ? well, even that the topic sounds quiet familiar to me, I followed the link to see the “bootload” scripts and the video. I was not sure what I was reading, so I have asked Jay Freeman (aka saurik), he is also the guy behind Cyrket – and that’s another story that will be back on it – who made more experiments with Android and Debian, and he confirmed my surprise ! You might find here Jay’s article on running Debian and Android together on the G1, there is even an update posted in G1 hackers on November 2008. Here is the second story :
“For the record, their installation script is itself a little misleading. They make it sound like they are booting Debian on your device, and their custom “bootloader” script even prints out things and seems to take a while to “run” Debian, when its just echoing things, running sleep occasionally (to make it take a while), and then running chroot to give you a prompt on the Debian subfolder.” explained Jay to OHM.
But what we have missed is the first part of the story, so to give back to Ceasar what is Cesar’s here is the missed part. Jay continued :
AndroidFanatic has even other problems. They had another tab you missed called the “market browser” which was just an iframe to Cyrket (a website I developed). When I denied their iframe they decided to go behind me and download the content from their servers (which they then would modify, such as to remove any mention of me or the name Cyrket, and to rewrite links to go back through their script). It was quite flagrant.
I figured out they were doing it again today thanks to the attention on slashdot and blocked them harder, making their website display this notice instead http://www.cyrket.com/fanatic/
We have just checked the time we was writing this article, and noticed that the “Market browser” have been replaced by the “Unofficial Repo”. We have no more comments to put on this story.
More information on running Debian on Android could be found here http://www.saurik.com/id/10
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January 19th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I have being hearing conflicting stories regards Androidfanatic.com, what they have done is combine a few scripts and an image into a simple installer, so that anybody (not just the techies) can enjoy Debian on their android phone.
Is this not what open-source is all about, the longer linux remains the toy of uber-geeks only, the longer it will remain in the shadow of the competition. For my part, androidfanatic.com have brought linux to me (the non-techie), and it’s right there in my pocket! Great!
I have it installed and to be honest, I love it. With regard to this cyrket thing, I don’t know anything about it. So I cannot remark.
January 19th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Open source is not about stealing code, it’s about giving credits to the original authors. It’s about ethics, anyone can use code but at least give credit to the original author. And there is not just code, read again the article.
February 19th, 2009 at 1:26 am
Blatant wannabes. No respect to them at all. Unfortunately, these things happen on the net every day, also with us:
http://blog.androidfreeware.org/2008/11/about-digital-theft-and-spam-in.html