Yes, I was pointing at the community aspect of open-source.
Just to get some source dumps after a while does not mean "open-source" to me. Seems people at Hacker News see this differently.
Yet, I agree with your comments, in general. Why not split it like they did for Chrome (suggestion in the comment below).
Re:Apple loses German patent court case
by blinkingled on Monday September 24, 2012 @03:38PM
(#4566512)
>Yes, I was pointing at the community aspect of open-source
There is a good reason for that. Show me one "community driven" open source project successful in the scale that Android is. Think about it, think about the other community driven SmartPhone OS projects and why they failed. What trade offs Google makes with Android are very fair and necessary - once they get the kernel bits in Korg it will only get better.
Re:Apple loses German patent court case
by xentronium on Monday September 24, 2012 @11:57AM
(#4565243)
They are already exerting control over what their vendors can and can't do. See asus aliyun debacle.
Re:Apple loses German patent court case
by fluidcruft on Monday September 24, 2012 @12:53PM
(#4565631)
That's a pretty extreme example and really more of a Google vs carrier battle than a Google vs Asus battle. Aliyun was trying to establish a Play competitor and lock Google out--you can't expect Google to play along. Since Honeycomb Google's been pretty strong relative to manufacturers. The biggest pre-Honeycomb threat was Motorola that was thrashing to cut Google out and get back in control (Skyhook, BlurOS) and... well you can see how the constellations happened to align there. What Google was threatening to yank wasn't access to Android, but access to the Platform Development Kit and possibly unannounced Nexus projects--i.e. access to the pre-Open Source drops. Someone like Amazon can pull that off because they don't care, but certainly Asus doesn't have the muscle. Asus was free to choose Aliyun or Google, it's not Asus's fault that Aliyun isn't as valuable.
Re:Apple loses German patent court case
by xentronium on Monday September 24, 2012 @02:49PM
(#4566261)
> but access to the Platform Development Kit and possibly unannounced Nexus projects--i.e. access to the pre-Open Source drops
As far as I understand, it also meant access to all google services for all acer (not asus, my mistake) smartphones. So it's an ultimatum after all.
Re:Apple loses German patent court case
by staplesowns on Monday September 24, 2012 @12:31PM
(#4565475)
Acer
Re:Apple loses German patent court case
by xentronium on Monday September 24, 2012 @02:41PM
(#4566221)
I should proofread my comments better, acer indeed.
Why? Because it's the only way to ensure a cohesive "ecosystem" that helps not only Google and their Android users, but also the manufacturers themselves in the long run. After all, if everyone had their own little fork of Android, and there wouldn't be an "ecosystem" anymore, that wouldn't benefit them at all, as these days it's all about "platform wars", and splitting one big platform into 10 different ones would actually hurt the manufacturers, not help them.
This is why I think Google needs to "close" Android even more i.e. standardize it a lot more, and even demand from manufacturers to release their drivers. It would be awesome if they told them to release open source drivers, but even closed source ones would be useful, because if everyone did this, Android could actually (eventually) work like Windows.
You would be able to install "Android" on any 2-3 year old smartphone or tablet. But that's only if the manufacturers would be forced to release those drivers and maintain the support for that amount of time. And that's only possible if the Android ecosystem becomes a little tigher/more closed, or "less open" (as in manufacturers can't do whatever they want, and they must obey a set of rules for the well being of the ecosystem).