The Android generation needs its Richard Stallman too

We are at a point in history where we cannot take back our privacy or computing control without anything short of a revolution. And who is going to bring that revolution?

Richard Stallman already did it for the PC generation. He quit MIT and started working on the GPL revolution way back in 1980s. And for what its worth, his efforts brought a lot of success. Not only the GNU/Linux system became complete because of GNU in it, the GPL also acted as a guiding force for Linux kernel development and millions of other FOSS projects too.

But that era is over now, today we live in the era of Android which is like a blotch on open source. Calling it open source sounds like a swear word because the user gets neither privacy, nor control of the machine (smart phone) which he fully pays for. In fact, a Microsoft Windows system could be arguably more open source than Android, at least they follow standards in computing and a user can pretty much do whatever he wants except change the core operating system functionality.

With Android, its all closed by the OEM or manufacturer. Only the OEM has the power to decide what version of AOSP to install and what apps to hardwire on it (you cannot even uninstall the so called "system apps" without risking rooting).

And while the Android generation has shoved RMS into a sort of early retirement by throwing all kinds of allegations against him in the Epstein case, they haven't come up with their own RMS replacement yet.

Without an RMS, there can be no revolution. We will continue to remain at the mercy of Google's monopoly in AOSP and the smartphone vendor's apathy towards bringing innovation and standardization in smartphone systems.

But the way I see it, revolution is difficult to come by today. Today's activists are a whole lot more interested in other political issues than software freedoms for the commons. Today's activists would rather vent their anger against their favourite archetypical enemy on a non-free social media platform than do something about the freedom and privacy issues with those platforms themselves.