On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Dan Morrill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 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. > Well, that's realistic, anyway. > 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. > Aha. Well, as I said, best of luck with getting those accepted, hope the effort doesn't make you any sadder. It did Nokia, and all they had were 50,000 lines of actual improvements to GTK... Like I said, projects hate code dumps, even worthwhile ones. > Android 1.0 is the beginning, not the end, for our engineers. > >From the sound of things, and how! > > > > > 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. > That's good to hear, too, even if it does guarantee a fairly inward-looking, insular, community, at least for a while. > 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. > Hm. I guess efforts like GNOME Mobile, Ubuntu Mobile, Moblin, GPE Phone Edition, the LiMo Foundation platform, Maemo, OpenMoko and a variety of others are just kidding themselves. They're all using GTK+, and I'd thought they were managing pretty well with it. Perhaps you're confusing GTK+, an interaction stack, with GNOME, a desktop program, or with the various window managers it can utilize. There's nothing specifically "desktop-based" about GTK that I'm aware of (although the widget libraries need work for smaller screens, something that's again, already being addressed in the open source community). It works quite well for mobile devices with a window manager (also open source) like matchbox. Can you be more specific about the technical issues you saw? If nothing else, they'd be excellent feedback for the GTK+ community. (I.e., I wouldn't mind hearing the "long version".) > 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. > Again, no one seems to be clear on just why "existing efforts didn't meet [your] need". "Fighting fragmentation" by introducing a whole different fragment seems a little odd. > > 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 > 2.0licensed. > Now, *that's *interesting. Is Google going to acquire Nuance or something? While I'm sure companies like Samsung, who are paying license fees for the use of that software now, will be gratified to save the money, I don't see how that leaves much of a business model for Nuance. Maybe I missed something. Is the TAT framework going to be open sourced as well? And Esmertec's Java VM? Sounds like serious money savings in store for the mobile industry at large, if so, but it'd seem to throw the futures of the companies making their livings with those technologies into some doubt... > 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. > Indeed. And passes that cost along to the end user in some way or other. But you seem to contradict yourself: if Google's acquiring the patents and releasing source for the codecs, why would anyone need to pay a license anymore....? Maybe I missed something in there. Of course, one of the big questions is that, given the non-reciprocal nature of the Apache license, what's to keep anyone from incorporating any improvements they might find in Surface Manager into GTK, or re-purposing those now-free (maybe?) codecs for use with Gstreamer, or getting the now-libre Nuance voice recognition integrated into, say, the LiMo platform...? It'll be dandy for all those projects I mentioned previously, maybe not so helpful for Android: there are a lot more developers working on GNOME-related technologies than Google's likely to be donating to the community to support Android *per se*... Maybe Google doesn't mind if that happens... Gonna be interesting. -- 鏡石 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
