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This seems to track pretty close to Google's recent moves in the Android ecosystem to move more and more functionality into Google Play Services packages and no

This seems to track pretty close to Google's recent moves in the Android ecosystem to move more and more functionality into Google Play Services packages and not in the AOSP. As it is a corporation in the business of providing value to its shareholders, I can understand why Google is trying to maximize its profit potential in these projects. However, I think it is really important to give visibility to these moves and for developers (particularly of open source projects) to understand that Google maintains these projects for its own benefit and not for the good of any perceived "community". Once again, this is the status-quo for for-profit businesses, so I am not exactly trying to criticize Google for this. That being said, I do think that Google's (increasingly tarnished) reputation as a champion of open source work is largely undeserved because of their tendency to pull stuff like this. This whole episode is also an example of why it is important to pay attention to the licensing and availability of the whole tech stack for a project. If functionality relies on a central server (that cannot be easily replaced/self-hosted that should be a huge red flag for anyone contributing to the ecosystem. (Looking at you, Canonical, and your Snap Store shenanigans...)

johncena33 6y ago
> Once again, this is the status-quo for for-profit businesses, so I am not exactly trying to criticize Google for this. That being said, I do think that Google's (increasingly tarnished) reputation as a champion of open source work is largely undeserved because of their tendency to pull stuff like this. This seems like "damn if you do damn if you don't" situation. Android OS and security upgrade is a mess just because OEMs are not willing to provide upgrades to customer in timely manner. That's one of the reasons a lot of functionalities have been moved to Google Play where customers can easily get updates of different components of Android even if the OEMs are unwilling to do so. Sure, this also serves business purpose of Google. But it's not the whole truth if we omit the OEMs and Android OS upgrade situation.
- kuschku 6y ago
  It’s easily possible to provide updates and keep it open source. Google did that in the past just fine with many AOSP apps, and even the android webbrowser parts are updated that way, and still open source. Google just used it as an excuse to make these parts of the OS proprietary.

johncena33 6y ago

> Once again, this is the status-quo for for-profit businesses, so I am not exactly trying to criticize Google for this. That being said, I do think that Google's (increasingly tarnished) reputation as a champion of open source work is largely undeserved because of their tendency to pull stuff like this. This seems like "damn if you do damn if you don't" situation. Android OS and security upgrade is a mess just because OEMs are not willing to provide upgrades to customer in timely manner. That's one of the reasons a lot of functionalities have been moved to Google Play where customers can easily get updates of different components of Android even if the OEMs are unwilling to do so. Sure, this also serves business purpose of Google. But it's not the whole truth if we omit the OEMs and Android OS upgrade situation.

kuschku 6y ago
It’s easily possible to provide updates and keep it open source. Google did that in the past just fine with many AOSP apps, and even the android webbrowser parts are updated that way, and still open source. Google just used it as an excuse to make these parts of the OS proprietary.