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: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.