Comments on: Does “Open” Really Help Developers?

By: Paul Cooper

Paul Cooper — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 05:37:18 +0000

We don't even know whether this is going to be open source, in the sense that they want contributions and a community, or just code that has an open source licence. No clues yet about how to contribute, SVN, bugzilla, copyright assignment, etc. And, as I understand it, they are only releasing the SDK next monday, not the source code.Plus given the great pains they goto in the FAQ to point out that the Apache licence allows proprietary extensions, and has none of the nasty GPL virality, what's to say that when an Android phone does get delivered in 2008, that you're not in the same position as now; an 'open' SDK on a mostly proprietary platform.

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By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 10:43:17 +0000

Well, I think that has more to do with the fact that at the time GMail came out, they were offering POP access and everybody else was charging for it. It was less about trying to pull the wool over peoples' eyes (since it was more open, relatively speaking) and more about the fact that "open" is such an overloaded term as to be meaningless. I mean, does Oracle still call its annual developer conference "Open World"? Do people laugh them off the playground because of that?

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By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:37:28 +0000

I sort of got the willies when Google Blog described Gmail as an "open application". The presentation layer may be inspectable JavaScript, but you can't host Gmail on your own machine... Gmail's servers are as opaque, proprietary, and suddenly-changeable as things get.

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