A firewall against Microsoft
Google announces android, an open mobile platform, that will be carried on by an alliance, Open Handset. Reading carefully a few sources, and seeing how Jonathan Schwartz congratulates them, it looks to me (disclaimer, no insider knowledge, pure intuition going on) that the SDK will be essentially Harmony + Eclipse + some Motorola mobility plugin for it.
Looking into it from further away, it is, as I thought soon after I read about it, a firewall for Microsoft. I had an exchange with Sam Ruby in August about Jabber/XMPP and Web 3.0. The unknown, as I pedantically corrected him, is not if we will surf the net with PCs or Phones, but rather how the devices will be called. Those will not be different spoons. The line between devices is slowly blurring, like it happened from minis to workstations to PCs. Android is about turning a mobile handset into a PC, much like Windows meant turning the IBM PC into a workstation. In the real sense of Personal and Computer: freedom to tinker and general purpose programming languages.
In this sense, android is a firewall, as it starts burning the forest, from the phone towards the PC, in just the opposite direction that Microsoft has been advancing, slowly, it is true, but advancing. Android is designed to stop them there, while linux slowly burns their fuel. It is called commoditizing your complement. Google needs computers and browsers to show their advertising, and wants those to be a commodity.
Update: I got the basic architecture conceptually, except for a few very important and innovative things:
- Dalkin is the name of the VM, almost, but not quite, completely different from tea. It is not java, but the Harmony classlib is compiled to it and it can run at least some java bytecode.
- The desktop SDK is based on SWT, the nice graphical toolkit used by eclipse. I expected lots of the technology around eclipse to be in use, as they have a lot of emphasis in the embedded market lately and are able to run in a big number of hardware architectures used for embedded devices.
- The whole phone OS is written using this Dalkin VM a la eclipse, which means libraries are embedded for significant functionality, like the webkit browser engine or GL libraries for UI and graphics, instead of re-inventing the world in java, as usual.
Dalibor: The android platform seems to be open enough, for what I see, that you can build a whole OS for your own device, say the openmoko one or even maemo ones, that you have hardware drivers for. This is a very good definition of open in my book, and I hope operators are not so stupid as to try to close it again. But we’ll see in the next few months how all this develops.
Posted by Santiago Gala atGiven that Android is not open source, it’s not open enough in my book.
You can’t build a whole OS with it. Google reserves the right to revoke your Android license if you don’t make them enough money, all the other FOU restriction nonsense aside in the actual Android license, etc.
It may be open source one day, who knows. But until then, Google is pushing the same sort of ‘proprietary software clouded in open source community buzzword marketing’ nonsense Sun did for years.
Posted by Dalibor Topic ats/Sun did for years/Sun is doing/ when they breach the JSPA agreements. Ask your closest people inside the JCP for the confidential results of the last votes held there to see that there is a lot of people thinking that Sun is wrong on their handling of openness.
Re: Google, I’m trusting them on the openness of the software, as I think they don’t really care about closing software at all. They care about being able to show advertising in the phones, and not being pushed off the platform like they got from Facebook.
Posted by Santiago Gala atIf JCP votes are confidential, I won’t be able to know about them, as I am not a JCP member, and I don’t particularly care about information I’d need to sign NDAs for.
OpenJDK is open source. Android isn’t. That’s all there is to it.
It took 8 years to get the ASF membership to a point where it understood that proprietary Java implementations are bad, that it had to get its act together and start working on fixing that problem. Let’s see how long figuring out that Android being proprietary is bad takes. ;)
Posted by Dalibor Topic atDalibor, can you distribute a GPL derivative of OpenJDK without passing the JCK? can you call it Java? is Java open source?
I’m quite sure there is no way an Open Source OpenJDK that is not Sun’s own, or substantially based on it can be delivered as Java currently, as per their JCK license. I’d like to see it happening, though. In my book OpenJCK is not open source. See for instance TCKs are only available with a commercial license.
With android we have a promise of it being released soon as true Open Software, something we can track and complain about, whereas with Sun’s current model I have FUD and no Open Source java. And you might notice looking into the list that a number of OpenHandset constituents are coming straight from the sadly defunct JCP.
Posted by Santiago Gala atin Mays.
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I’d assume that Google cares a lot more about making the system easy to close off from users, than about providing a tinkerable platform, given that they had to bring in some companies on board that aren’t known for their open source contributions. ;)
The interesting question is: ‘Open’ for whom? And my speculative guess is that it’s going to be open to the sort of members the alliance now has, but not open to you, Sam, or me. I’d be surprised if we see many phones coming out of this that are 100% open source, rather than 20% open source due to the kernel being GPL, and 80% proprietary.
It would be great if this was Harmony based, but with Aplix & Esmertec on board, but not the ASF, I’d find it unlikely, all the technical arguments aside. My tip would be Motorola’s Apache licensed ‘announced but never released’ JME implementation.
Posted by Dalibor Topic at