Android is a screwed, hard-coded, non-portable abomination.

What the hell was that? Ah, gnumonks.org, makes sense. I was wondering who in their right mind would be flipping out because a mobile-freaking-phone didn't have 20 years of GNU userspace laying around. What until they find out it's not running X11...

A mobile phone OS that expects to be running on a mobile phone. Those bastards.

Doesn't seem like a big deal to me, but then I'm not a Linux guy.<p>And J2ME is portable and that's <i>truly</i> an abomination.

The guys at Google are not stupid. They are actually some of the smartest guys I've ever met (I haven't met anyone on the Android team, though). Most of them also have fairly extensive experience with Linux. To make the implied assertion that they just threw everything out and hard-coded the system because they are stupid is asinine. I'm guessing that they were aiming for squeezing as much performance out of the system as possible. Considering how abysmally slow many of the smart phones are, I can't blame them. Purity as the highest ideal in software engineering is for academics. In the real world, performance is much more important goal.<p>And the idea of using X11 on a smart phone is laughable. Please, let's not continue to perpetuate that monstrosity on any more platforms.

<p><pre><code> for (char *p = strchr(tmpfn, ' '); p &#38;&#38; *p; p = strchr(tmpfn, ' ')) *p = '_'; </code></pre> OW MY BRAIN.

Yes. Linux is a kernel, and you don't have to use a traditional GNU userland with it.<p>Maybe I'm missing something, as I'm not too familiar with android, but I thought that android apps were compiled to Dalvik, which is Java based? I fail to see how any traditional userland software would work anyway...

For those that are interested in Linux on mobile phones, Nokia's Maemo 5 mobile platform offers a more traditional GNU/Linux environment. It even allows the enduser to gain root access using "sudo gainroot".

Just because Android has a hacked Linux kernel underneath doesn't make it anything but a quasi-JVM-based Sidekick, written by exactly the same people.