It&#x27;s unreasonable to expect commercial software companies to do all the work to build a free software ecosystem, since that&#x27;s not what they&#x27;re about. Still, they&#x27;ve made some substantial contributions. F-droid might not be good enough yet, but they&#x27;re still a lot further along than they would be starting from scratch, without Android.<p>So although it hasn&#x27;t succeeded for phones yet, building on top of tech stacks contributed by others (who haven&#x27;t fully bought in to the same goals, but are sympathetic in some ways) still seems like a great strategy. The free software community needs to finish the job.<p>On the other hand, going fully independent and building stuff separately without those contributions (which seems to be what some free software folks want to do with commercial-unfriendly licenses) doesn&#x27;t make a whole lot of sense to me. If you can&#x27;t succeed even with substantial help, how do you succeed without help?