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Open source mobile developer: Android is not the answer

By Jacqueline Emigh, BetaNews

March 20, 2008, 6:38 PM

Will the Google-sponsored Android platform be the right alternative for today's proprietary mobile environments? The answer is an emphatic "no," according to open source developer David Schlesinger.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Although Google has announced high profile wireless carriers and phone manufacturers as partners in the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), the search specialist has done "absolutely nothing" on the directly related Android Project, to date, Schlesinger said today at the AjaxWorld conference.

"Google can't just 'toss things over the wall' [to other open source developers] and expect things to happen. 'Tossing things over the wall' never works, anyway," stated Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies for ACCESS. "Companies like Google think there is just one 'open source community.'"

But Google's impression of the community, as Schlesinger perceives it, is simply not accurate, he added, citing Java and the Linux kernel as just a few examples of the countless open source projects going on today. He also publicly questioned whether it was appropriate for Google, as a search engine firm, to lead an initiative around mobile development.

Speaking with Schlesinger after his talk, BetaNews asked whether he thinks Google should simply stay away from industry mobile development issues.

"Not at all," he replied. So what should Google do instead? "Google needs to be a much better citizen of the community," he told us.

More specifically, Schlesinger said that Google's Android, which has barely even gotten off the ground, represents a lot of overlap with other mobile development projects which are already thriving, including work by the Limo Foundation, Gnome Mobile, and GPE Phone Edition.

"We don't want Google to reinvent the wheel," he said. "We already have [mobile] Linux."

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By Hellcat_M

posted Mar 21, 2008 - 3:20 PM

Only time will tell weather Andriod is a usable OS. I hope they can give Apple a run for their money. As for Ubuntu on a phone, I hope it does well too. We need good OS' for the phones. I would like to be able to walk into my local cell phone company sales center and be able to pick out a phone and tell them to install the OS of my choice, that would be nice. I doubt this would ever happen though.

Score: 0

By DonGato

posted Mar 21, 2008 - 8:43 AM

The market will say if it's a good thing and not the OSS community. They can do what they couldn't with any other mobile platform until now so I doubt there won't be any OSS community backup anyway. And keep dreaming if you think an OSS initiative without any backing out as the kinds of Google will be taken seriously.

Score: 0

By templar™

posted Mar 20, 2008 - 11:16 PM

"the search specialist has done "absolutely nothing" on the directly related Android Project"
Wow! Do BetaNews not verify obviously untrue statements such as this one? I was like "huh!?"

Fortunately, Schlesinger clarified below that he didn't say that.

Score: 0

By akaLefty

edited Mar 20, 2008 - 9:47 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.

Score: 0

By pitdingo2

posted Mar 20, 2008 - 8:20 PM

Gee, image that. The: vice-chair of the Architectural Working Group of the Linux Phone Standards Forum and acting Steering Committee Chair of the Linux Foundation’s Mobile Linux Initiative does not like Google Android.

Who cares what this dude thinks? Let me guess, tomorrow there will be an article quoting Steve Ballmer saying the iPhone is no good.

Score: 0

By bousozoku

posted Mar 21, 2008 - 2:47 AM

I'm cynical so I suspect there is a little something extra behind the response to Android, also.

I'm more interested in what the mobile phone makers think. Their experiments will tell whether Android is worth it or not. I haven't seen a mobile version of Linux that was compelling yet, but Ubuntu has been indicating that they're planning some interesting iPhone-like technology.

Whatever works smoothly and easily. No more difficult to use phones, please.

Score: 0

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