vB Easy Archive - How much Google involvement do you see

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How much Google involvement do you see
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Posted by: manchuia

I know they are launching the platform (Android is a company they have bought) and I know they will put their core software packages in the offerings (maps, mail, calendar, documents, books(?)) but other than being a top level nameplate, how much do you think they will really run the ship.

Do you think they will just set a foundation to help themselves and then at every question say "open community!!"?

Or, do you think that they will be hands on in development and oversee design and use of their Operating system by their partners. Maybe not really "controlling" but .. "advising".

This is my big concern. I love the fact of open source, but without a little bit of guidance and "rules" you can start to get divides because certain people will always think certain aspects are more important. Heck, look at any phone battle thread, people will say Wifi is brilliant, while others claim QWERTY is mandatory. I just worry that if it is too open source this will become like the linux divides where you have a billion and a half Google phone distributions and the average person (who really really might benefit from the OS) won't touch it as the people running the ship can't even decide what they want to do.

Posted by: nelbiz

i think this opens a very good debate. i agree with you 100% about companies not being able to set a structure as to how they want to integrate all the benefits of android. but i personally feel that if google controls the majority of the OS and create a standard platform that the other companies can add to would be the best way.

Posted by: geoff.scottcomm

I wouldn't worry about it. Lots of successful large open-source projects (Firefox and Ubuntu, to name two prominent examples) are managed by a central authority who decides what code gets included in the end product. It's pretty much just the way large OSS projects work these days, and I see no reason to believe that Android will be any different.

Posted by: Elfreshcuh

hopefully some linux will be in there

Posted by: manchuia

Quote:

Originally Posted by geoff.scottcomm

I wouldn't worry about it. Lots of successful large open-source projects (Firefox and Ubuntu, to name two prominent examples) are managed by a central authority who decides what code gets included in the end product. It's pretty much just the way large OSS projects work these days, and I see no reason to believe that Android will be any different.

I know the major projects work that way, but .. for example, Ubuntu is still a fracture based off of Debian.. there are other Debian derivatives out there as well. I guess my "concern" would be more like Android being Debian (or some other major distribution, but the phones themselves being the offshoots (like Ubuntu) that focus on a specific goal through the distribution (Ubuntu being usability).

I wonder how much Google will work to prevent that fracturing to preserve brand identity, or will they simply say "open source!!" and be happy as long as it runs their core programs?

Posted by: geoff.scottcomm

I don't think so. OSS only really came to the fore with genuinely good applications fairly recently. Firefox and Ubuntu both released their first versions in 2004, and OpenOffice.org released its first version in 2005. Prior versions of those (i.e. Mozilla/Firebird, Debian, Staroffice) were clunky, nerdy affairs that played well with the OSS advocate crowd but were far from ready for primetime (the exception being certain centrally-managed Unix distributions for use on servers). So beginning about three years ago, we started seeing OSS suddenly blossom into a mature model, proving that it could produce high quality software to rival commercial applications. Not coincidentally, that's also when we started to see a much greater focus on centralized management of OSS projects, driving development toward a coherent vision.

In other words, every large OSS project that has ever been truly successful has had the same style of centralized direction that Firefox has. I don't think this point will be lost on Google.