2008/3/29 Stone Mirror <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > That's good to hear, too, even if it does guarantee a fairly > inward-looking, insular, community, at least for a while. >
Yes, that's one possible outcome. The questions you're asking are on our minds, too, but at the end of the day we're just going to have to get the code out there and then work through it. We realize this is a process, not something that happens overnight. We aren't going to send somebody an email and then expect to see patches committed by the next morning. (I.e., I wouldn't mind hearing the "long version".) > I'd be happy to talk about it -- although I propose a new thread. :) Care to start one? > Is Google going to acquire Nuance or something? > I'm not familiar with the specifics of the relationship with Nuance. I do not believe that a merger or anything like that is involved, but I am not informed as to what the details are. Instead let me describe the Alliance in general terms. The purpose of the Alliance is that members join to contribute something that fills a specific need. That is, it's not a consortium in the sense where joining amounts more or less to expressing your interest and support of a particular effort. The Alliance is more like the "core team" of an open source project. Each member contributes something specific and important to Android. In some cases that means source code, in others it means expertise. For instance, Nuance is contributing a voice-recognition engine to open-source, while TAT is contributing their expertise in UI design. Google is contributing Dalvik (among lots of other software) and staff to handle things like marketing and answering questions in the android-internals forum. ;) Is the TAT framework going to be open sourced as well? And Esmertec's Java > VM? > I am not familiar with TAT's products, so I don't know what you mean by "the TAT framework." TAT is designing the UI for Android, and their designs are being implemented directly on the Android APIs. I am aware of Esmertec's product line, but I know nothing at all about the details of their contribution to the Alliance, so I can't answer that question. 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. > I don't think you missed anything, it's just messy. :) We plan release the source; patent rights to actually sell a phone using them are a separate matter. I will ask our attorney and see if I can get a more detailed answer to this. > 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... > Yes, you've got it exactly -- and not only do we not mind, we'd love to see it happen. As a general rule, Google prefers the Apache 2.0 license, because we believe it's the most progressive and flexible license available. We want to make it easy for everyone to benefit, including LiMo and other projects. We believe we've got a very solid product and we're going to work hard to be very competitive, but we know better than to assume that we're the only ones who can create something cool. > Gonna be interesting. > I'm glad you agree! - 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
