romeosidvicious
Android Enthusiast
There is nothing to challenge in court. MS provides the single most used operating system in the US so it fall under anti-trust laws. With phones you have a choice of multiple OSs, multiple carriers, and multiple plans per carrier. Since there are multiple carriers that actively compete against each other there is not any anti-trust issues. To top that off you can buy a phone, from any carrier, without a contract and not buy their services. You even have a choice between CDMA and GSM carriers if you want. Sure you can't use a GSM phone on a CDMA network but that is a technical restriction and not a business practices issue. Furthermore Sprint not allowing third party devices on their network is not a restraint of trade practices or anti-trust since you have options. You can simply go with a less restrictive carried.
The phone's OS is open source but that doesn't mean you can do what you want with the installed system. All Open Source means if that you can get the source and modify it to your liking. HTC could make a phone that required a special device to flash, sell the device only to Sprint thereby making you come into the store for updates with no other way to get them and they could still use Android on the phone and Android would still be Open Source. You can add to the OS as you see fit but the hardware is not Open Source and the load itself is not Open Source only the OS. You can add to your phone as you see fit by rooting your phone but the trade off is that you lose support and rightfully so. No-one should be expected to support, beyond manufacture's defects, anything that an end used can modify as you can once you root a phone. It would be overwhelming for support and practically impossible. Even Dell when providing RHEL on servers only supports the shipped configuration in the stated use. If you add functionality or remove daemons and so on you pay for every bit of support out of pocket.
An industry as a whole cannot be guilty of anti-trust and as their is massive competition in the space there isn't a legitimate argument for restrictive trade. You have plenty of choices and just because there isn't one that fits your ideal doesn't mean there is anti-trust or restrictive trade practices going on.
