QNetter

You can't re-download media -- but you definitely can re-download apps.

Open source is a religion to you -- it's a means to an end for me. It's a development model that makes for cost-effective and rapid development. To me, as a philosophy, it comes with serious costs, as it turns technologists and artists into day-laborers, able to enjoy only direct compensation for their labor, not for the use of the fruits of that labor. To me, it can contribute to the Third World-ization of the USA as much as offshoring and union-busting do -- so I use it only to the extent that it builds a better solution that is worth the trade-offs.

Android phones are a great example of what, to me, is the true non-philosophical problem with open source (and the reason that, unless things change dramatically, I will never use one): developers develop for developers. Most users -- and I have set a career goal of being less and less technical as I get older, so I fall in this category -- want safety, simplicity, and beauty. Most open source UIs are the work of core-tech developers who slap a bunch of knobs on their code, instead of building a usage model in the UI and then putting functionality behind it (literally as a sequence, or figuratively as a philosophy). As a result, not only do I not know which Android apps I can trust, but when I run them, they look like 1996 X Window System apps, drowning in inconsistency and raw edges.