Sierra_Dad - 2:49 am on Jul 31, 2011 (gmt 0)

You can write HTML 5 and have it be usable in both closed system iOS and "open source when it's convenient" Android. That said, I have used the Android SDK to develop for Android, and I have no idea whether this webstack is closer to HTML 5 or to SDK style development.

We do need another OS. Competition is good, trying things is good, and this also has the advantage of being open source and guaranteed to stay that way.

Competition is good for the end user, and for hardware manufacturers, but whether it is favorable to Boot to Gecko remains to be seen. It's going to have to be something more than "we're more open source than everyone else". Linux is dominating the desktop market, right?

Small hardware manufacturers will benefit. Some developers consider opensourceness to be a moral or religious issue; I worry more about whether it will have more than one digit of market share.

End users won't care. Try explaining to your average neighbor why they should buy a Boot to Gecko because it is more open source than Android. I'm sure they will be thrilled that they don't have to wait for tech support, they can just download the source and debug it themselves.