NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Android Is Open? That's A "Farce, " Says Facebook Developer Joe Hewitt
On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 11:47 -0700, Lauren Weinstein wrote: > Android Is Open? That's A "Farce," Says Facebook Developer Joe Hewitt > > http://bit.ly/axec7P (Business Insider) It seems more than a little disingenuous for a representative of Facebook to be complaining about restricted access to a development process and tight control. Facebook have so far resisted every attempt at collaboration via open standards in social networking and related technologies and their entire system is closed. As long as the source code is published, I don't think there can be any question that Android is open source, but the distinction between open source and what I will call open development is something that is interesting. Hewitt apparently assumes that open source is the same thing as open development and this has probably historically been true, but as Android development shows this is not necessarily so. Open development takes full advantage of crowd sourcing since any member of the public may participate fully in the development process, but the disadvantage perhaps, is that development focus may be diluted, or development time may be extended due to the difficulty in getting a large number of people to agree on the development path. Closed development in the case of Android may allow Google to control the features and refine focus which is probably important in the consumer oriented smartphone marketplace. More importantly it probably allows them to more tightly control the development time so as to align with the window of opportunity in the marketplace. Open source with closed development still allows the developer community to facilitate bug fixes and refine features that have been released. Russell.
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