It’s good for you. It’s bad for phone manufacturers who bet on Android.
And I suspect you’re missing where Gruber is coming from. He’s just reveling in some schadenfreude. Google spent quite some time claiming Android is better because it’s open. Either open is good in and of itself, in which case this move is bad for everyone, or it isn’t–in which case the prior claims were unfounded.
If you think my forking is impressive you should see my branch merge moves.
I wanna hear all about your acquisitions baby.
But Gruber’s bullshit insanity is that this means Android isn’t open, which is nonsensical untruth. People upthread have explained pretty well what this means, but it’s in no way Google closing everything up. Gruber imagines this as some grand reversal, some attempt to make Android like iOS, and it’s just not.
If I were an indie game developer I wouldn’t be holding my breath for any sort of standardized platform to comprise a large share of the Android installed base. Android is never going to be the kind of gaming platform iOS has become. Someone is always going to try and run your game on their hacked Nook that falsely reports a set of capabilities, and complain when it doesn’t work well. I don’t think that’s going to hold the platform as a whole back over much, but games that 1) cost a bit to develop and 2) have specific hardware expectations are never going to have a happy home there.
I’m fine with them using the full “Google Experience” stuff (access to the Market, the default GApps like Gmail, Navigation, etc) as a stick to beat the vendors into not crapping up their own builds of the OS, but I’m not at all a fan of this new post-Honeycomb thing of them not releasing the OS code to coincide with the first devices based on that codebase.
Me neither. At the moment, I’ll cut them slack and treat the actual devices as pre-release beta-quality things (based on playing with one at Best Buy, this is 100% accurate; frustrating and unresponsive, it was), and give them a pass for not releasing the 0.9 version of their code. But if they don’t release it soon, and do the same thing with future releases, well… I will frown very heavily in their direction, see if I don’t.
I will give them the finger, and I hope they see it because I’ll be doing it as hard as I can.
Admit it, you just want to browse his trunk.
Good luck getting him to give you commit privileges.
It’s “open” as in “No, you can’t have the code.”
This is not a “new, post-Honeycomb” thing; the OEM builds are always out of the private branch. The AOSP gets updated later, when the Android Dev (up to now it’s been just one guy) responsible does the huge merge. I’m not surprised they are deferring this effort until Honeycomb settles down.
Would it be accurate to say that even if nothing has changed about how open Android is, they always overplayed the practical benefit of that?
By which I mean that there’s a significant competitive advantage to having early access to Android releases over having eventual access when a new release is finally “opened” to everyone, and if you want that early access, you are going to be playing by Google’s rules on at least some level. So when Google talks up Android being open, they’re not wrong, but the advantage is a little more theoretical than they advertise.
Am I way off base?
http://twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429:
the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”
Benefit to who? From a user perspective, I care about it being opened, because it means that my device can be supported long after the manufacturer quits giving a shit about it, like the MP3 player that I installed Rockbox onto; that I can find alternate builds of the OS with some features (like FLAC support in Cyanogen, say) I want; and that the OS maker can’t prevent me from using the thing however the heck I want.
All that stuff is still certainly true, so from a user perspective, I think the benefits of openness are there.
The advantage to a hardware maker is a) no licensing costs for the OS, and b) the ability to ruin it with proprietary bullshit to make your phone more distinctive and unique. The first advantage remains, but the second is being diminished in this case. I tend not to think that’s an actual advantage anyway, though, so.
(Then there’s the other advantage of free, which is to the OS maker, who could benefit from all the enthusiast labour, or the labour of other companies’ employees, by doing their development in the open. Google’s never gotten that, but oh well, I guess.)
Yes, wonderful. And YOU CAN STILL DO THAT. Just not with Honeycomb yet, but give it a little time and it should be there soon. Yes, if this proves to be more than just a delay, it’s objectionable, but Google is explicitly saying they are releasing the source, they’re just not ready to yet.
Also, of course, those of us who have been paying attention to this stuff for a while now know that “open” is pretty much a continuum, and there are degrees of openness. Android is less open than Linux, more open than Java, and way way way more open than iOS.
That sounds about right to me.
When you’re the primary developer of a platform, you’ve got a lot of leverage you can bring to bear–even if the platform is “open”. Google is starting to exercise that leverage.
Okay, now, see, if I believed that you were a Stallman-esque free software crusader, I’d have some real respect for that statement. Because, y’know, it’s not open enough, and Google should be pressured to open it up more.
But if, as I suspect, you’re actually an iOS partisan who’s taken Gruber’s turn toward crazy and ended up hating Google for no obvious reason, then your statement is ridiculous overstatement designed to confuse things and make Android look bad.
If the platform is really open, there’s a hard limit to the amount of leverage you can bear. If Google tried to become super-dictatorial about Android, it is a 100% certainty that the OEMs would band together to make some sort of Android Development Alliance or something and continue to develop their own, OEM-favored version of Android. That’s one of the beautiful built-in checks and balances in open source projects.
It IS a new thing because of the timing. AOSP has always been pushed out the same week as the first product using that version, usually days before the actual product launch. With Honeycomb that hasn’t happened and the non-official word from Google is not to hold your breath for Honeycomb source even though the Xoom has been out for weeks now.
I did mean a benefit to the hardware makers. I don’t think Google or the handset makers actively court the segment of the population who would think to root their phones and load their own OS, or whatever. There’s probably some marginal benefit from landing that niche techie market, but not enough for openness to the end user to make the bullet list of why you should make your phone with Android, or why you should buy this phone they made with Android.
So yes, I was mainly focusing on the b) advantage to hardware makers.