Yeah but fuck the hardware makers though seriously.
Again, this depends on the user. Every Android device I’ve had has been running custom ROMs that place it at least one and sometimes two major versions beyond what the vendor supplies officially. The ability to do this is very important to me personally and the fact that it is an option is the #1 reason I use Android instead of iOS. Google’s recent decisions with Honeycomb (assuming they are now policy and are not just a one-off for Honeycomb) are a primary threat to the continuation of this which is why I’m officially Not A Fan.
Gruber isn’t crazy. Or hysterical. He’s just amused after years of iOS getting beaten up all the time for being a “walled garden” and whatnot. Google is discovering that letting everyone do anything to their OS isn’t really working for them so they’re tightening their control over it. I don’t care either way, but given the apparent complaints from Google’s partners, you’re mostly just coming off as unnecessarily defensive and apologist here. Gruber doesn’t care enough about Google to hate Google. Or RIM, which he also mostly finds amusing. He kind of likes Amazon.
If he hates any company it’s probably Adobe, but mostly he hates bad tech journalism.
Yeah, I’m not seeing where Gruber is off-base here.
Open source didn’t work here. This isn’t real open source.
And I’ve seen OSS get forked for much smaller philosophical changes than this.
Again, I think (and Gruber thinks) that this change is for the best. It’s just funny seeing the crow that everyone is eating. And also the bait-and-switch Google has pulled on their partners.
I don’t think you understand what open source is, honestly. Android is produced under the Apache license, which is certainly an open source license (OSI and FSF approved), and every Android phone currently on the market is derived from the open source codebase. Given the success Android has had in the phone market, open source certainly has worked.
As for Honeycomb, the Apache license allows for exactly the sort of thing they’re doing with Honeycomb (proprietary derivatives of the open software), so it’s legit and legal and all that. But yes, you can argue that Honeycomb is heavily proprietary software derived from an open source base right now, and you’d be right. And if Google were saying that hey, it’s going to stay proprietary, well, then the “not open source lol” people would be dead on (and all the GPL-uber-alles people would be firing up their “BSD style licenses are the devil” rants, and I expect the Android open source community would start in on their own tablet-friendly open-source fork, because obviously there are people there who care a lot about such things).
But right now, Google is saying that Honeycomb will be open sourced once it’s fully baked, and Google’s actions with Android have engendered a certain amount of trust – they really have made a serious effort to engage and support the open source community, much more than they’d need to if this was an open-source-lipstick project – so people are mostly sitting back and waiting to see whether Google continues to be non-evil.
And at any rate, my point about Gruber and his ilk is this: If Google really was planning on closing up their future Android development (they can’t close up the past; Gingerbread is open forever), then someone who was really concerned about open source would be looking to find a viable future development path for an open source derivative of Gingerbread. But Gruber doesn’t give two shits about openness, obviously, and he’d mock people who tried to do that as “neckbeards.” All he’s interested in doing is trying to use Google’s rhetoric against it to make them look bad, while trying to handwave the part where Apple is still worse on every possible measure. His argument can be boiled down to, “Hey, they talked about openness, and then they did this one thing that wasn’t open, therefore you shouldn’t care about openness any more and should embrace dictatorial control.”
Because, honestly, even if Google completely closed the Android source going forward and said that they were going to develop it completely proprietarily from now on, Android would still be the most open mobile OS out there – among other things, it lets you install software from arbitrary sources (like the Amazon market, .apks downloaded off web pages, etc.), which is more than can be said for WP7, WebOS, or iOS. And as long as that’s true, any criticism of Google’s openness from proponents of more closed platforms is just disingenuous monkeyfuckery.
So your summary here is “They’re not pissing on my head, it’s raining gold?”
My question for people like you and Nawid, who are so quick to giggle about Android’s putative non-openness, is: So what do you recommend? As someone who cares about openness, I think Android is the best game in town regardless of some moves Google’s made that I don’t approve of.
You obviously disagree, so what are you recommending?
Again, you’ve missed Gruber’s point. He’s not claiming to be some open source advocate. People have been beating on Apple because it isn’t open. Google execs themselves made a big deal about this in presentations. Now Google is discovering that it’s in their best interests to take more of the kind of control that Apple gets pilloried for, and Gruber is laughing at it.
Look, this is probably a win for Android as a product for Google, and a win for Android as a product for most consumers. It’s a minor lose for third parties basing their business model on fucking around with Android, and it’s a moderate embarrassment for the most strident “It’s better because it’s open!” Android partisans. Trying to deny that Google’s new stance is a new stance or that “less open” doesn’t mean anything, move along, nothing to see here just makes people look silly.
I agree with the part where Gruber is not an open source advocate. But the last sentence palms a few cards by painting Google’s level of openness with Honeycomb as somehow equivalent to Apple’s level of openness with iOS.
Because, again, what Google is doing here is not releasing its code as open source in a timely fashion. Does Apple get pilloried for that? No, of course not. The thing Apple tends to get pilloried for, and where all the “walled garden” comments come from, is its iron control of the App Store. And nothing I’ve seen here has indicated that Google is doing anything to shut down app distribution outside the Google Market. Nobody’s even alleging that’s the case, not even Gruber.
Gruber and other Apple partisans, having endured criticisms of Apple’s heavy-handed control of iOS, are desperate to make this into some kind of equivalency, but it’s really not. Think about what would happen if Apple adopted Google’s “not open” policies: They would be making hardware with an unlocked boot loader; allowing software to be installed on iOS from any source at all, even to the level of replacing system-level software like the App Store, program launcher, keyboard, or browser; licensing iOS for use on any hardware; running iOS as an open source project, albeit one where they still develop new versions in secret, and don’t push their new source down for 3-6 months after new hardware ships.
If Apple were acting like that, would they be criticized for a lack of openness? By Stallman, maybe. But not by most people. In fact, most people would be praising them to the heavens for how incredibly open they were being, remarking on it as a complete about-face and the dawn of a newly open era at Apple.
And so if that’s the case, then it’s hard to see why people would be pillorying Google for those policies. Which is why Gruber’s criticisms are so random and incoherent.
You are totally incorrect here.
Firstly, google’s approach has worked magnificently, in that android is now the dominant smartphone platform.
Second, android’s strength compared to ios has stemmed not simply from open source of the os itself. It stems from the fact that anyone can make any software they want for the platform.
This is the stark difference between android and ios. This is what makes android open compared to apple’s walled garden. Apple is able to arbitrarily ban any application they want from the only legitimate distribution mechanism on their platform. When google does that, then I’ll be worried. For now, the only people who care about this nonexistent change don’t understand it.
To be fair, Google can ban any application they want from the (until two weeks ago) only legitimate distribution mechanism on the platform. They just tended to only ban blatant viruses and copyright violations of existing apps, and even then, only after hundreds of reports or massive media criticism.
Hell, one could almost say that Google could be a bit more proactive about clearing out patently harmful apps from the Market.
No they couldn’t, because android has no single app distribution mechanism.
With an iphone, to install an application that doesn’t come from the app store, I need to jailbreak the phone, which is beyond the capability of most users.
With an android phone, to install an application from somewhere other than the app market, I merely need to click a checkbox in my settings.
Google Pulls PlayStation Emulator From Android Market
Here are the reasons Google may remove your application from the Market:
Illegal content
Invasions of personal privacy or violations of the right of publicity
Content that interferes with the functioning of any services of other parties
Promotions of hate or incitement of violence
Violations of intellectual property rights, including patent, copyright (see DMCA policy), trademark, trade secret, or other proprietary right of any party
Any material not suitable for persons under 18
Pornography, obscenity, nudity, or sexual activity
Emulators themselves don’t run afoul of any of these policies, and they’re certainly not illegal. It’s a different story if you include copies of games with your for-pay application, but as long as the program is “bare” and it’s left to the user to find and play legally copied titles, the application should be acceptable.
Timex: I suppose it depends how you define “only legitimate distribution mechanism.” I hardly considered the alternative markets prior to Amazon to be well-known or trustworthy enough to spend money in them (and to be fair, most of them catered to various degrees of illegal activity barring a couple of paid-app alternate vendors), and sideloading apps is enough of a confusion to the average, first-time-smart-phone, non-techie user that it doesn’t really enter into it. Basically, the average Android user only knew about the Android market until two weeks ago when Amazon started touting theirs.
So while “technically” it’s always possible, it is outside the bounds of what most people can do or figure out quickly. Removing that PS emulator from the market, as Marcus just linked, will remove it from the minds of a good 95% of Android owners in the US today.
The way I see it, “Open” means 2 things.
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Open Source OS. This is attractive to hardware manufacturers, so they can brand the OS and sell handsets to new customers. It’s also attractive to open-source developers, but there’s not enough of them to matter. Most all of the open-source nature of the Android OS is used by tech literate folks to compensate for the traditional apathy that carriers and handset makers show to existing users. Google’s new stance, while pissing off the handset makers and carriers that “abused” Android in the past, is ultimately a good thing for end users because I just think that Google’s got much better taste than any of those folks.
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Open App Installation. Developers like this, because they hate middlemen (even if one could argue that Apple is giving a better deal than any middlemen in the past).
Does this mean better apps for end users? Aye, there’s the rub. It’s a trade between the “curated” Apple app store and the possibly-confusing and more variable app quality of multiple app stores and direct downloads. The Angry Birds developer pointed out that the markets are very different. People generally pay for apps for iOS devices. People generally don’t pay for apps for Android devices, and so developers use advertisements to make money. Google’s got no problems with that, they’re all about selling ads.
Me, I’m iOS all the way. I’ll take tangible quality over the promises of openness, so I’m glad Google has decided to stop letting carriers confuse end-users.
Out of the box, you can’t sideload on the HTC Aria.
So John “Hans” Gruber links to Andy Rubin’s response to all this. Basically, Rubin’s position is: We’re still going to release our source, manufacturers can still fuck up the UI if they really want to, this is a non-story.
There’s really not much to say to that, but Gruber jumps all over the loophole that when Google works closely with particular manufacturers on pre-release versions of the software to create a flagship device highlighting the new version, they might put some extra conditions on that, to which I think the only appropriate response is, “Huh, good.”
And the reality is that that’s not even new, because Google already put restrictions on those manufacturers in the past.
They also pulled Grooveshark.
Still quite a few emulators up though.
Mkozlows, isn’t the main point, that if you want the source, you would have to wait? I mean as of now, do we even have the source code for the current Android versions? How long is the wait?