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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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company philosophy and goals. A company that makes an open-source

mobile operating system like Google Android has little control over how the

OS will be used and who can modify it. A company that makes a closedsource

operating system like Microsoft Windows but licenses the OS to

device makers has more control—the company knows the OS won’t be

modified and can be picky about which devices to license it for. A company

making a closed-source OS like Apple iOS for its own devices can tailor-fit

the software to the hardware it will run on. A company that builds an OS

others can use and modify as they see fit and a company that builds an OS

hand-crafted exclusively for its own hardware obviously have very different

underlying philosophies and goals.

The big thing to keep in mind with an open-source operating system like

Android is that companies building devices that use the OS don’t have to

share the OS developer’s underlying philosophy—they can have wildly

varying goals and development models of their own. If the operating

system’s license allows it, each of the device makers could modify the OS

before installing it on their own device—and never release those

modifications. The modifications might just enable special hardware to work,

but they could also install apps you don’t want and can’t remove, cause thirdparty

apps coded without knowledge of the modifications to malfunction, or

collect information about how you use the device.

To bring this all together, the point is that a manufacturer can put an opensource

operating system on an otherwise closed-source device—don’t assume

a device is itself open source just because the mobile OS it uses is. In fact,

vanishingly few of the devices with an open-source OS are best seen as opensource

products.

Think back to the earlier discussion of an open-source development

process and apply it to a smartphone. The most extreme interpretation of an

open-source smartphone is that the maker has released all of the instructions

and code someone else would need to manufacture an identical smartphone

and all of the components inside it. A more likely (but still exceptional)

scenario is that all of the software on the device when it leaves the factory is

open sourced, including the operating system, drivers, and the firmware

powering its components.

Apple iOS

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