To be more specific, the philosophical goal of free software is to increase user autonomy. If your phone has free software which speaks only to closed services, not much autonomy is gained, because your data (and in the facebook/myspace case, your online identity) is in the end controlled by another party over whom you have very little leverage.

I’m not so sure about them selling your personal information to a third party, it might be illegal. They’ll probably use it to fine-tune their ads for you.

This is entirely on the money. The problem with Android is less likely that it won’t really be open; an open source phone stack is a perfectly good free razor for Google to use to sell razor blades (i.e., its ad-revenue-generating web services). The worry is that an open phone is not much comfort if your data is all stored by closed web services. This isn’t just a problem with Google, of course, it applies to Facebook, MySpace and lots of “Web 2.0” stuff.

There’s a small but growing group of people in the free software world thinking about how the principles of open-ness that guide free software could be applied to web services. See, for instance, Luis Villa’s attempt to define “Open Services”

Huh? Google makes vast sums of money on an open source platform with real competition. You can run any web browser on any computing platform and as long as you use google.com for searches (with Google ads) and google is perfectly happy.

So google has every reason to believe it could make money in an open phone platform environment, but also reason to worry that companies like Verizon (all your ring tones are belong to us) will use control over closed platforms to monopolize the business.

I am particularly thinking here of the “live” coverage of AFL in Australia, the way google sends adverts into my email, that sort of thing. I wonder if there is a better model of the internet out there, and we are missing it because the dominance of players like google has prevented us seeing it. And I don’t think a free phone based on advertising is going to help us see the forest for the trees.

Neel at #12 seems right on all points. Matt at #15 merits a better response.

As for why this is better than Linux, it has everything to do with market share. You only get good apps if you have a critical mass of developers and consumers to create a vibrant market. In its entire history, Linux has failed to do that and it still isn’t a real solution, especially not in the mobile world. You may be happy as can be with a Linux phone, but the fact is that most people won’t be. Android will fulfill all the potential that Linux could never realize because its development community and user base is peopled entirely by arrogant snobs who can’t be bothered to make things accessible to the common user.