I haven’t posted yet on the Android announcement, mostly since I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. My take at the moment is that I’m hopeful but not optimistic, if that makes sense.
Here’s a brief excerpt from a post by Steven Frank that neatly summarizes the main reservation I have with it:
A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite. It’s going to be some half-baked turd undoubtedly based on GPE since that’s, you know, better than starting from scratch, right? (Wrong.)
For heaven’s sake: Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling me it’s new, exciting, or in any way innovative. Be ready to fail, many times, but for love of all that is holy take a stand on something.
The thing is, most of the time really great products (especially software) are pioneered by a small group of people who try something that ends up working. Larger teams are sometimes appropriate and can be productive, but only if the initial “vision” (for lack of a better word) is set and everyone else rallies around that to make it happen. Having that many companies involved will more likely than not result in a product that has too many built-in compromises, designed to make everyone happy. which can’t be done.
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[...] as to how the platform itself will turn out. Specifically, the primary concern I linked to in yesterday’s post seems to not be so big of a deal, at least up [...]
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Andy Rubin created the vision himself when he started the project on his one before the 2005 acquisition by Google. And from what it seems Google kept him as a small team, since it took so long, and kept the vision, since the mission of creating an open platform for phones is what is going to be released in android.
The open handset alliance is a by product of android and bringing in products and service support to give it a kick start not to dilute the open platform.
As far as the article goes, I completely agree with it and I’m surprised you even associate yourself with it, since that’s what I’ve said for years. But I still think he misses the point that Android is not a Google Phone, it’s just a platform for others to us. And since Google seems “good” they wanted to share Rubin’s vision with better support.
It’s my understanding (at least according to the Wikipedia article linked above) that the OHA is very much involved in what will eventually be released as Android (rather than just releasing devices to support the platform).
So far, I don’t think anyone has seen it yet, so (like I said), I hope it’s great, but I’m not going to set my expectations too high.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the article, other than I worry about the “too many cooks” point he brings up. I also like the first part of the last paragraph, where he talks about the importance of ease of use over features. Not sure why that’s too surprising.
One thing he doesn’t cover, but that I think is the key to the importance of Android is its openness. To the degree that they prioritize freedom, I think they will find success AND benefit the mobile community.
I would have rather seen them go for GPL as opposed to the Apache licesnse, but I do understand why they felt they had to go in that direction. That’s the other part that gives me pause, because it means that the end products released to the consumers still may be closed and proprietary, despite being originally based on an open platform (sounds familiar
), which I would not be in favor of.
Just in case you didn’t see this in my shared items,
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071106-why-google-chose-the-apache-software-license-over-gplv2.html
I think I do remember seeing that, although I didn’t read it until just now. I’d agree with their speculation on why the Apache license was chosen; I just wish they would have had the guts to go with GPL instead.