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It's kind of amusing to me how every now and then someone proclaims that Google has "lost control" of Android and how this must be some kind of crisis and porte
by zmmmmm 14y ago
It's kind of amusing to me how every now and then someone proclaims that Google has "lost control" of Android and how this must be some kind of crisis and portends a looming disaster.
Then we will have a series of people proclaiming how Android is not really open and what a farce Google's pretense of openness is, and what fools we were to ever believe that Google intended to make an open source operating system.
Frequently this will be followed by people lamenting "fragmentation" and demanding that Google put a stop to it by putting tight controls on who can implement Android and how they can do it.
These are all different sides of the same coin. Openness = fragmentation, openness = loss of control, openness = diversity, choice, innovation and endless possibility. It has benefits and downsides to be sure, but to think Google didn't know they were giving up some control of Android when they released it as open source is absurd - open sourcing something is by definition giving up control of it.
- Mythbusters 14y agoActually I think Google's openness is a quasi. Otherwise you wouldn't see them blocking the acer phone.
- myko 14y agoAcer is free to use Android in any phone they want. They would just have to use a different app store than Google Play. So, Android's openness is absolute. Google's openness (Google Play, Gmail, etc) is not.
- gonzo 14y agopoint in fact, this is not what happened.
- ajross 14y agoAnd yet they aren't blocking the Kindle. So how do you square that?
- Mythbusters 14y agoI'm sure they would if they could. Amazon is not a member of OHA so google has nothing to enforce that ban with.
- ajross 14y agoSo you agree with the flip side argument that Google is just enforcing existing business agreements to which all parties are signatories, you just choose to interpret it as uncharitably as possible for Google. Yawn. Business is business. Using open source software doesn't magically absolve you of responsibility to your contracted partners, nor give you the right to jerk your suppliers around. The simple truth is that Amazon handled this gracefully and produced a great product, and Acer screwed it up and wrecked things for their partner Alibaba. Making Google out to be the bad guy is just fanboism.
- gonzo 14y agoI agreed with you until the last sentence.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago>Business is business Funny, that reminds me of the scorn heaped on Apple for the patent lawsuits against Samsung. Or on Oracle and Microsoft. Business is business, right? Regardless of other companies getting hurt? Also reminds me of this post by Gruber supporting Apple on in app purchases: http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_percent http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_percent It's really ironic how people claim their favorite company is better than the others because of blah blah blah reasons, but when it comes to power plays hurting third parties like this, support it by saying "business is business".
- eurleif 14y agoSamsung didn't violate a contract it signed with Apple. The situations really aren't very similar.
- 14y ago