Open Source

Oh my goodness, Fake Steve Jobs says everything there needs to be said about the Android announcement. I started this thought on Twitter, but didn’t take it to the depths it needed to be taken.

Here’s the point: It doesn’t take 34 companies to build an open platform (just ask Steven Frank). By definition, if you create an open platform, anyone can use it. But Google knows if they created a GPL’d Linux OS for mobiles that no one would care, not just because it isn’t their own proprietary brand (and therefore wouldn’t rake in licensing dollars) but because most of these guys already have Linux-based OSes and it’s not that revolutionary an idea anymore.

More importantly, it takes hardware and an infrastructure to do mobile. Unlike a computer, say an Apple I, that you can build in a garage, program and run locally, a phone needs broadcasters, relays, and all the good stuff that is already owned and controlled by seriously powerful folks. Google didn’t even talk about a mobile hardware reference platform that the OS would power, something that could have unlocked an open mobile platform FOR REALS.

I don’t see a consortium developing Linux, I see one organization. I also see a lot of businesses taking it and creating their own profitable distributions of Linux, and opening up their own refinements back to anyone else running a different distro. But it’s mostly one group and one visionary pushing the message and driving it to places it needs to go. And with the hardware problem solved, anyone can build their own PC box and load Linux on it—it’s messy, painful but it can be done. We simply can’t do this with mobiles.

In a way, this announcement feels like Google has just given up. Gone are the grand schemes of cutting out a wireless band for free and open devices (even though the “open access” US 700MHz auction is still going ahead as planned) and in its place are associations and consortia to keep the big networks and manufacturers interested and let Google have a piece of the pie somehow.

The power is still very much in the hands of companies like Verizon and Samsung, and for an organization as powerful and game-changing as Google, this is just plain disappointing.

I think the first line in the Android FAQ summarizes the disappointment perfectly:

“Android is a complete mobile phone software stack. It includes everything a manufacturer or operator needs to build a mobile phone.”

For everyone else, it’s just another cell phone. Woo.