Android's "Non-Fragmentation Agreement"

superglaze writes "The biggest doubt cast over Android (whose SDK was released yesterday) has been the fact that much of it is licensed under Apache. There have been worries that manufacturers might fork the code road in a non-interoperable kind of way. I.e., they would have no obligation to feed back code to the wider Open Handset Alliance, or even tell the other members what alterations have been made. However, it turns out that Google made all the members sign a 'non-fragmentation agreement' to make sure everything works with everything. In theory at least. 'All of the partners have signed a non-fragmentation agreement saying they won't modify [the code] in non-compatible ways ... That is not to say that a company that is not part of the OHA could not do so.' Google's spokesperson highlighted the historical dangers of working with Java, the programming language that lies at the heart of Android. 'One of the current problems with mobile Java development is that Java has fragmented ... Java virtual machines have fragmented, but all the members of the OHA have agreed to use one virtual machine that can run script in Java'"

Comments

Re:Java? Fragmented?

[jdeisenberg]

I'm going to lose all my karma points, but here goes...

From this (and other comments in the previous postings about Android), one might get the impression that the people at Google are a bunch of idiots who just didn't do any basic research. Why, if only they had read Slashdot occasionally, they'd know that Java is slow, has 10^6 different versions, is very slow, is inferior to C++, is extremely slow, takes up too much memory, is abominably slow, is a programming language that no real programmer uses any more, and in general is teh sux0rz. <grin/>

Re:Google versus Apache

[Kadin2048]

In a strange kind of way, this is Google versus Apache.

I really don't think it is. This is Google taking the Apache license and then fixing a major perceived weakness in it, at least within the context of their application (creating a single, uniform, mobile platform). And even then, they're not really restricting the software; they're just getting the people who are part of their trade group to agree not to stab each other in the back.

It's not Google "versus" anything or anyone, except perhaps maybe the closed-source phone manufacturers. Certainly not Apache.

Re:Oh, FORK!!!

[ajs]

Sounds to me like they don't want anyone forking it. Read it again. The members can't fork the development. Non-members can. They're just trying to prevent the situation where, 5 years down the line, NTT says "thanks for all the hard work Google, but now that we've achieved brand loyalty, we're going to stop working on our competitor's OS." The idea is to make the cell phone OS a commodity and let cell phone makers focus on higher level features that will work on any phone.

GPL solves these problems

[dmoen]

I agree that the use of the Apache licence is the biggest problem with Android.

If Android had just used the GPL (which prohibits forking), then this problem would have avoided. There are lots of examples to back this up. For example, if Emacs had used the GPL, instead of the Apache licence, the XEmacs fork would never have occurred. And if Gnome and KDE would both switch to using the GPL licence, then the projects would just magically merge into one, and we wouldn't have the duplication of effort and lack of standards that you currently see on the Linux desktop.

Oh, wait... (consults Google). Never mind.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

[omeomi]

behaving rather bizarrely by on the one hand warning about the problems of forking and then on the other releasing their own JVM Dalvik instead of using JavaME.

You've never written a JavaME (J2ME) app, have you? Getting a J2ME application to work properly on all phones is a huge nightmare. Just when you have it working on your phone, and all of your coworkers phones, you try it on your wife's phone, and find that it completely doesn't work. There's plenty of fragmentation just within J2ME, and it's made worse by the fact that it's almost impossible to test an application on every different phone that's out there. If Google can come up with an SDK that makes "write once run anywhere" a reality in the mobile world, I'm all for it.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

[dintech]

'Write once, run anywhere'. Hmm, I'm a java programmer and have been for 10 years. I know, as every java developer knows and realises, it actually means 'write once, run on the important places'. Meaning something that works on your desktop PC will also work on the Solaris server you intend to deploy it to.

Mostly people who use 'but I thought you said run ANYWHERE' argument should actually try to think about what that would mean in real terms. For example, should you expect a huge Swing application or something like Weblogic 9 to run on your 8 year old J2ME phone? Be sensible please...

Re:Revisionism?

[Anonymous Coward]

but J2ME phones all run the same code and the same APIs. Issues between phones almost always come down to working around JVM implementation bugs This is just plain wrong. Once you start looking at graphics, audio, keyboard input, bluetooth, gps, network, photo or video capture or anything beyond very basic apps, you reach the murky world of JSRs, which are bits of java that may or may not be included in a particular j2me installation. If they are included, many of them have lots left up to the implementation to decide, for example MMAPI leaves it up to the implementation whether to support MIDI sound, whether to support playing audio directly from code rather than from a file, whether to support recording, what file formats to support etc. You can't even reliably play audio files across platforms, let alone do interesting things like get at the camera, get video frames etc.

Nokia phones for example, most will let you grab a single frame from the camera, some won't, but you can't grab multiple video frames without a 1/4 second delay per frame, whereas motorola phones, many will not let you at the camera at all, but those that will, will let you record multiple frames properly, except for a few which will only let you take single frames.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

[crush]

Whoever modded him offtopic was either being childish or desperate to hide the information. Probably just a fanboy.

Reading further on this, the interesting thing about Dalvik is that it's a non-Sun-controlled JVM. The thing about JavaME (aka PhoneME) is that although it (like JavaSE and JavaEE (Glassfish)) is released under GPLv2, there is no exception clause (there is for JavaSE). This means that you can only run GPLv2 code on PhoneME. Obviously Google and it's partners didn't like this, so they wrote their own JVM. In order to avoid infringing on Sun's IP they've made the bytecode unique to Dalvik. So Java goes in ---> Dalvik bytecode comes out, runs on Dalvik. Very clever.