Google Android: a little bit open source
p2pnet view Open Source:- Fact: You can’t take anything online adco Google says at face value.
It’s in-house sophists are the smartest and smoothest in the bidniz and if they say White is White, you can believe the reality is: it’s a murky shade of grey.
When it introduced its Android cellphone O/S it actually described it as a “semi-open-source structure”, said p2pnet at the time.
“ ‘Semi-open source’ reminds me of a term coined by Robin Williams,” observed Just my two cents in a Reader’s Write.
“… sort of like Partial circumcision …”
Or ‘a bit pregnant’.
“Until Android is read/write open, it’s no different than iOS to me. Open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell.”
So says Joe Hewitt (right), a “Facebook staffer who has a long list of open source accomplishments: helping create Firefox, building the dev/debug tool FireBug, and working on Facebook’s ‘Touch’ mobile website and its native iPhone application (which TechCrunch suggests he may have built singlehandedly)”, says TMCNet, quoting the Guardian.
Joe’s comment comes in his Twitter page, where he also says >>>
Compare the Android “open source” model to Firefox or Linux if you want to see how disingenuous that “open” claim is.
And >>>
How does Android get away with the “open” claim when the source isn’t public until major releases, and no one outside Google can check in?
Still directly quoting the Guardian, “Andy Rubin, Google’s head of Android (formal title: VP of engineering), pitched in with one of the geekiest tweets ever on the definition of open, TMCNet continues, to wit >>>
mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make” Which, translated out of CommandLine, means: you too can build Android, the OS, by grabbing it from git. (Look, there’s Android!) Unfortunately this is as disingenuous as people are accusing Jobs of being, as that doesn’t mean that Google will approve your phone, or that you’ll have access to the baseband software that the phone needs. You can’t get what you want for free.
It goes on >>>
Here the path forks, in the best open source ways.
First, Rubin’s tweet might persuade those who love to root their phone that yeah, Android is really open. But the proportion of people who want to recompile their phone OS is even smaller than the number who want to root their phone, and that proportion is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who buy smartphones. You’ll be standing in the street a long time before you can stop someone who’ll react with pleasure when you tell them “Hey, you can compile Android’s code from source yourself so you can install it on an Android phone you’ve already got!” So while Rubin’s code might carry bragging rights, in the scheme of things it’s meaningless. You can compile Darwin, which underlies Apple’s Mac OSX, but that doesn’t mean your Dell will boot up with an Apple screen.
TMCNet adds, citing Hewitt’s Twitter tweet # 4, “I think it is the lack of visibility into daily progress that bothers me about Android more than the lack of write access.” (Google doesn’t let people know what’s being developed in code, or let them view how it’s progressing – unlike, say, projects like WebKit or Firefox, where everyone can view the changing source, try it out themselves and even offer suggestions; though on WebKit being an external contributor is a privilege that has to be earned.) A little later: ‘Point I am trying to make is, Rubin bickering with Jobs is a farce, because both refuse to share the one thing that matters: control.” Of course Jobs has never pretended that Apple has handed over control of the iPhone’s OS to anyone else. Google, though, is having a go.”
Stay tuned.
p2pnet – Wanted: Android blogger, May 12, 2009
TMCNet – Android and RIM teams lay into Jobs – but Google criticised on ‘open’ claim, October 20, 2010
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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