Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Andy Rubin, on Monday posted his thoughts on recent news that Google was clamping down on its partners that want to change Android.
[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]Last week reports surfaced that Google now required a partners changes to Android to be approved by Rubin. The change affected many big names like Facebook and Verizon, but more importantly seemed to go against Google’s openness.
In response, Rubin says that device makers are free to modify Android, but then adds a caveat.
“If someone wishes to market a device as Android-compatible or include Google applications on the device, we do require the device to conform with some basic compatibility requirements,” wrote Rubin.
Also last week, Google delayed the release of its tablet operating system, Honeycomb. Google admitted it took shortcuts to keep up with Apple’s iOS, but that didn’t work out so well for them.
“We continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready,” wrote Rubin. “As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types.”
Rubin: “Lalalalalalalalala…”
But Apple got Lala! 😀
We are open, but you can’t see the source until we say so and you have to pass muster to use all the features of our open OS.
Sure. Plays with the mooks.
Open assholes
Seems like this response took awhile.
Mr Rubin is being intellectually dishonest. He himself has defined open as “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”
Now he seems to have changed the definition to the ability to customise the UI and the lack of any any ”efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture.”
Yet, if I wanted to download and compile Honeycomb, I can’t. The door is closed. Only Google and Motorola have access right now. Right now Andy Rubin is controlling the sourcecode, and it isn’t open. ”One man, one company, one vision.”
What happened to the definition of open?
It’s not open until I say so, isn’t open.
Everybody starts to defend when they are proved false, its a part of marketing strategy!!..
Everybody starts to defend when they are proved false, its a part of marketing strategy!!..
I find the best marketing strategies involve forum posts using pseudo identities that link straight to the sales site.
When are these jackwagons going to learn that being “open” only matters to “fandroids” and “media geeks?”
As long as they can get what they consider to be positive results in the developer community from claiming openness, they’ll continue to do so.
It’s open, not because it is, it’s open because I say it is.
I find it interesting what Rubin didn’t say. He didn’t say that Google was going to release the Honeycomb source. He said that they were hard at work doing the same features for phones which they would release the source to when it was ready. Everyone is assuming that Android 3.0 is going to be delivered for phones but as far as I know, Google has never said that.
Is Android 3.0 even part of the Open Handset Alliance? If not, then this is a new product, not a change in strategy. All of this would be parsing his words very carefully and it is probably not what he meant but I find the choice of words that he used interesting.
Especially when you end the sentence in which you state something annoyingly obvious with two exclamations marks and two periods.
Google can show their OS up their wide open ass.
The whole bunch of Google’s C-level — and Adobe for that matter — should apply for a job at Prawda
Google’s version of open source is the same way your local garbage dump is open: Go ahead, pick through it. Take what you want. But by the time it reaches the dump, it’s all old broken crap.