On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 3:04 AM, Dan Morrill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 2008/3/29 Stone Mirror <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > The open source community at large, historically speaking, *hates *"code > > dumps" (aka "toss-it-over-the-wall-ware") *especially *extremely huge > > ones. > > > > Yeah, that's definitely on our minds. We feel pretty bad that we've got > such a huge pile of changes that we haven't been able to send upstream. We > understand how open source projects operate, and we'll work with the > specific upstream teams to send them our code in whatever way works best for > them. > Well, good luck with that. Which "upstream teams" do you think will be taking on Surface Manager, Binder, Dalvik and the remainder of the never-before-seen portions of the platform (i.e. almost all of it), I wonder... > > Implicit in your observation is that large dumps are a lot of work. It > would be pointless and rude to dump a huge pile of changes on a project all > at once. Waiting until we can do a good job of releasing the source also > means waiting until we can dedicate the attention to the upstream projects > that they deserve. > Sounds like these "upstream projects", whoever you imagine them to be, may be waiting a while. I'm not sure how something like Surface Manager or Dalvik can be released, other than to effectively "dump a huge pile of changes" into some entirely *new *project... They certainly seem to have no relation to any existing "upstream project". > > Evidently the existing work in the open source community wasn't good > > enough for Google. It seems to be good enough for Moblin, for Ubuntu Mobile, > > for the LiMo Foundation and numerous others. > > > > You seem to be saying that open-source is a zero sum game, and that effort > we spend on Android somehow detracts from those other projects. By your > argument, Linus Torvalds was wrong in creating Linux; he should have bit > the bullet and contributed to Minix, instead. > No, that's not what I'm saying. Remember, Linus started Linux for his own edification and amusement, "just for fun", as he put it. There was not nearly the mature open source community in 1992 that there is today. If there were, and if Minix had a significant community around it, then yes, I'd think it might well make more sense for Linus to have worked with that community rather than start a whole new effort from scratch. You're comparing apples and oranges here. What I'm saying it that--to take Surface Manager as an example--the folks most qualified (outside of Google) to do continuing work on such a project are *already *working on GTK+ or Qt or compiz or something similar. I don't see that they're going to be interested in dropping those efforts to help Android's Surface Manager out. They may be interested in taking *pieces *of it to improve specific aspects of GTK or Qt, and thanks to the "developer friendly" Apache license, you won't really be able to keep them from doing so. None of that's likely to help Surface Manager for Android. There's a finite number of folks working on open source platform development today, that's a simple fact. In order to get those developers to work on Surface Manager, they'd presumably have to free up some time from their current efforts. I'm saying that I believe they're unlikely to do so. So, in a sense, it *is *a "zero-sum game", but not in the way that you're suggesting. > > We believe that the more open source code is out there, the better. > Well, I don't think it's a simple numbers game. I'd suggest that quality, and consonance with existing efforts is at least as important as the sheer number of lines of code out there. There's no shortage of moribund projects. Functionally, Android is in large part duplicative of existing efforts. Of course, until it's released, the quality of Android's underlying code is unknown and unknowable. As far as consonance with existing projects, there isn't any, and deliberately so--as I said, that was a completely conscious decision that Google made. This is what I mean about Google's unwillingness to work with the existing development communities preferring instead to go the "massive code dump" route. > We'll just keep plugging along on the stuff that actually available now, I > > guess... > > > > Please do! The last thing we want is to force developers to pick a single > platform. > Well, not that you *could, *even if you wanted to. But if you don't want to "force developers to pick a single platform", why have you created a platform to (or from) which it's effectively impossible to port existing code, and on which one can't use existing languages, frameworks and APIs...? Let's be very clear here. Rich Miner said<http://www.macworld.com/article/60916/2007/11/androidantifrag.html> : When we looked at the other [mobile] Linux activities out there, oftentimes they're initiatives that are based on Linux but their resulting platforms aren't completely open. Or they're completely open and they're Linux, but they're missing most of the things that [Android has]. They probably don't have video codecs, Midi sequencer, speech recognition. So they're not a complete phone stack. The goal with Android was to build into it everything you needed to release a phone: an entire stack to build a competitive smartphone or high-end feature phone. So, why couldn't Google provide just the missing, un-free pieces, for the benefit of existing projects, and work with the community to make improvements where Google felt they were needed, *with *the community. Why the necessity to come out with a whole new platform to go along with them? Also, does this suggest that, for instance, Nuance (for instance) is going to be somehow giving away their speech recognition software for free to the world at large, turning what's now proprietary into an open source project? Does it mean that Google is going to somehow pay the patent and licensing fees on behalf of the rest of the world to be able to provide "free" video codecs...? (If the latter is true, I'm sure the Open Media Now! Foundation, for starts, would be happy to hear about it...) I'm a little skeptical of either of those things happening, actually. Please correct me if I'm mistaken here. -- 鏡石 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Internals" group. 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