I agree on all counts.

That guy was incorrect: that bug never occurred with this jailbreak, and has been long fixed on the one that did cause it.

This bug has been known for so long, in fact, that it was fixed weeks ago in a newer release of redsn0w/PwnageTool, and this issue does not and never occurred with the jailbreak in question here (jailbreakme.com). Please stop redistributing obsolete rumors and lies as if they were facts.

No, sorry, /that/ is absurd. While I was able to write and deploy Cycorder with the SDK (barely), I would not have been able to write WinterBoard, Cydget, or Veency. I would not have been able to build and install APT and X as part of a full Unix environment for the device, nor could anyone have written the Bluetooth Keyboard driver we now have in Cydia.

I have no clue where you got the belief that you can tinker with the iPhone "just as eas[ily] [...] as any computer": the only reason we can mess with the device at all is because it is jailbroken. The original poster was not talking about writing silly little applications in a sandbox: he was talking about actual /tinkering/.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the Palm Pre is about as open as Apple. They have a website where they claim to distribute the source code to their platform, but it is only what they are legally required to distribute. In fact, even that they fall short on: many of the packages aren't compilable as they are holding back on critical header files.

The libpurple-adapter, in particular, must be licensed under GPL (as libpurple itself is), but Palm has been telling representatives of the open source community that they would have to sign an NDA to get access to the full set of files required to make it work, which only be distributed only under a very restrictive temporary license. As someone who has spent a lot of time fighting similar causes with Apple (I'm the developer behind Cydia) I can say that they would /never/ pull shit like this: when I've sent GPL complaints Apple has always fixed the issue rapidly, and I would even receive e-mails from all related departments apologizing for the mixup.

Seriously: if Palm can't even compete to Apple's standards for openness, then you know something horribly evil is going on over there.

For the record, Android is not just about running stuff in Java: the developers at Google are actively working on the semantics behind having accessible JNI, some of the existing applications (including the OpenGL demo from Qualcomm people rave over) are mostly written in C, and we are likely going to have an entire Android "NDK" for doing native development to play with. Android is definitely the entire platform, including Linux.

If you search around on the android-platform mailing list you will find discussions of the various issues you are bringing up (such as multiple devices, architectures, etc.) and the various solutions (and non-solutions) people have for them.

Yeah. This makes the "instructions" rather dis-useful: they are simply "install X" (as X is already ported and we already know how to get Debian setup on the device), "run the X VNC server", "connect with an Android VNC client". The instructions should likely just have been placed in the article summary rather than forcing us to click through to AndroidFanatic to just get disappointed :(.

That was also my thought (I'm the guy who organizes the g1-hackers mailing list, and has been pioneering Debian on this platform, and any changes required to init and the kernel needed to support it) ;) I almost responded "if you check, I actually registered the domain name, and once I finish the changes required to get Debian installed to / I am likely to put the final instructions there with a bug tracker", but then I remembered I hadn't /actually/ bought it yet. I quickly did just now. ;)

For the record, this is just a shell script that runs the commands listed here: http://www.saurik.com/id/10. AndroidFanatics generally doesn't reference it's sources. At least this time they (arguably) provided some value in packaging, but that usually isn't the case. The Android Market Browser it has, for example, is just a republished download of http://www.cyrket.com/. It used to be an iframe, but when I told them I wasn't okay with that they decided to just wget the contents. They don't even have the intelligence/decency to reformat it at all, making the entire thing quite flagrant. Frown pants.