2008/3/29 Stone Mirror <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 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... >
Er... we don't expect anyone to; we will maintain them ourselves. Android consists of several totally new components such as those you listed, and some patches for existing upstream projects (such as Apache Harmony.) Our engineering teams will maintain our original components going forward; we don't expect any third parties to assume ownership of these. When I said that we're sad about having to sit on a large backlog of upstream patches, I was referring to those projects whose software we've used in Android. Android 1.0 is the beginning, not the end, for our engineers. > There's a finite number of folks working on open source platform > development today, that's a simple fact. > Finite, but constantly changing. Once we've cleaned up the source and "push the button" to release it, that number will jump upward by the size of our engineering teams. We aren't expecting to poach developers from other projects. We intend to grow the open-source community in every sense. 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? > An excellent question! This is a technical question, though, not an open-source one. The short version is that we think desktop-based environments like GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE inherently reflect a desktop way of building applications, and Android's framework is designed explicitly for mobile applications. In other words, Android has two goals: First, to be an excellent mobile platform on its merits, and second, to be open and open-source. We decided the existing efforts didn't meet our needs, so we designed one that does. 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? > That is correct: Nuance's speech-recognition engine will be open-sourced. I believe that's one of the things that will be Apache 2.0 licensed. > 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...) > Also correct: the source will be released for the media framework, and the codecs. As you say, in some cases there are patent licenses that need to be acquired. I am not involved in the business side of the project, so I don't know what the situation there is, but the traditional industry model in these cases is that the manufacturer, carrier, or retailer pays the license on a per-unit basis. - Dan --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Internals" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-internals?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
