Slashdot Mirror
Google Exec Hints At Future Open Platform
rsmiller510 writes "At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Dave Girouard, who is president of Google's enterprise division, stated that his company's long-term goal is to open up the Google development stack to outside developers. If this is true, then it could have some serious long-term implications for developers who could use Google services in new and interesting ways."
Don't worry, you were counted in a long time ago whether you knew it or not.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
There's a danger with the word "open", as it carries such good connotations for us here. However, just because we like "open" doesn't mean that whatever is coming from Google is going to match our expectations, let alone our desires.
You have to remember that Google is a very different beast to RedHat for example. Google's business M.O. is like that of no other corporation, so it's hard to draw comparisons, but nobody would ever suggest that they are "an open source company" (not even close), despite the many open source projects that they host, promote, support, and of course use. At best, they are a "somewhat open source friendly" company, and undoubtedly they also know that being open is becoming increasingly important, so they're responding to that.
Note that Google's main products are all closed, and most of them possess a few annoying "features" that would have been fixed by now if they were an open source company --- I'm sure that we can all point to some "feature/bugs" that irritate us personally. :-) In fact they're not even very good at responding to popular feature requests (almost apathetic), so true wide-scale openness is really a long way off for Google.
Given the above, I think that some caution is required when interpreting highly non-specific words spoken by Google execs. While we would like them to become massively more open, their openness may not come in a form that the FOSS community would find particularly attractive. In particular, any thought that Google is going to cede huge amounts of control over to open source developers is almost certainly sheer fantasy.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Well, it's not the OS's fault when the hardware (aka the phone) won't accept altered versions.
Note that in the mobile phone business software locks are the norm - and for a reason: branding. Without the ability to brand phones many network providers won't sell the phone for a subsidised price. Branding if course needs to be sufficiently complicated to remove. And shall consist of more the a start-up screen. Orange for example likes to remove the ability to use mp3 as ring tone - so you need to buy ring toned from - you guessed it - orange.
So Google is between the devil and the deep blue see here. Without software lock down no subsidised phones which in case of a smart phone means a â1000 price tag. Which in turn means: very few customers.
Of course I can see a way out of it: Developers edition phone for everyone who is prepared to pay the unsubsidised price to get total freedom and end user edition with the needed lock downs.
Usually developers editions (at least for Windows Mobile, Symbian etc. pp.) are only available to those you can prove that they are full time mobile phone developers and sign NDA's on top of it.
Martin
If whatever they are going to open up (didn't RTFA) is as open as Android, it will only be open to you if you are a large company that has the money to manufacture . To the rest of us, it will be as open as an iPhone.
After Android, I don't hold my breath when Google promise anything open. I'll believe them again when they open-source Google Earth or something.