Favorite Files

No favorite files added yet

Recent Posts

1. Comment - Open source mobile developer: Android is not the answer

   (Mar 20, 2008 - 9:46 PM)

   Jacqueline, a couple of corrections and clarifications:
   
   1. My employer is ACCESS, not "the FOSS firm Open Source Technologies". My title at ACCESS is Director of Open Source Technologies.
   
   2. I didn’t “publicly question” whether it was "appropriate" for Google to do Android: I said that the bottom line for Google was that they were an advertising company, and anything they did ultimately came back to that.
   
   3. I didn't say Google had "done nothing", just the contrary: I said that as near as it was possible to tell, they were the _only_ member of OHA who'd done any significant work on Android.
   
   I _did_ say that throwing a million lines of never-before-seen code at "the open source community" will prove to be a disappointing experience for Google. The existing open source communities don't want huge code dumps, and especially not of code that is completely unrelated to the mainstream of open source development. It's not as though the folks who work on GTK+ are going to suddenly drop that in order to maintain "Surface Manager" on Google's behalf.
   
   (When it's released under the Apache license, whenever phones finally ship--probably in 2009, from all appearances--it's possible that existing communities might "re-purpose" some of that code, but that's not going to benefit Android at all... Apache is non-reciprocal, so there's no obligation to republish changes to the original code, nor any barrier to using as much or as little of that code as one pleases...)
   
   Hope this clears up some confusion.
   
   --
   David "Lefty" Schlesinger
   Director, Open Source Technologies
   ACCESS Co., Ltd.