Xavier Niel, CEO of Iliad, parent company of France’s low-cost, innovative telecom company Free, announced today the imminent arrival of the latest over-the-top triple play box, the Free Mini 4K. The announcement, which came amongst much speculation, after Niel released cryptic invitations with an encoded message ‘Surprise,’ will see Free bring the first Android-powered Triple Play solution (TV, Phone, Internet) to consumers in France. In addition, the product will also be 4K compatible, anticipating the imminent release of 4K solutions to users. The price for the latest box, which is 5 times smaller than their most recent box, will be 29,99€/month with no contract.
Niel knows how to throw a party, control an audience, and, even, make competitors tremble. After the invitations came yesterday to today’s press announcement, all three Telecom competitors (Numericable-SFR, Orange, Bouygues) saw stock prices lose a couple of percentage points, as investors waited to see what the damage would be. In fairness, Iliad, too, saw its stock drop as well – it seems investors hadn’t quite made up their mind.
One of the biggest parts of this announcement is that Xavier Niel seems to be putting to bed his feud with Google. Previous years saw Niel fighting with Google over YouTube’s data consumption on his network, hoping to get a similar deal to what US Telecom companies are getting – under this deal, is Niel burying the hatchet with Google? It certainly seems so.
Practically it also means that Niel prefers to deal with Google than with GNU people when it comes to licensing/modifying the OS of Free boxes. More specifically he was adamant that the GPLv3 was an impediment to business. (in French: http://linuxfr.org/news/free-publie-enfin-ses-patchs-sur-les-logiciels-libres ). He put his money where is mouth is…
I doubt this has anything to do with “GNU people”. Iptables/netfilter (involved in the GPL controversy you quoted) is also used on Android (remember: Android is more or less a Linux with a different C library) and the same problems would probably pop. Same with modified kernel drivers. This has probably more to do with externalizing heavy development (interface, video handling etc.). And Google will NOT let anyone customize their OS the way Free did with their Freebox – are you aware of the crazy conditions each vendor has to respect to use the official Android OS ?
But Xavier, what makes you think that Free is using the “official Android OS”? Free hasn’t all of sudden jumped ship and joined Google out of the blue. They have been discussing for a very long time (think about the Youtube throttling mentioned by Liam …
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