Disclaimer: I don't work for OHA, the LiMo Foundation, any of their members, or any wireless carrier or handset manufacturer.
Stone Mirror wrote: > Nope, that's not how open source development works. Not at all. Sure it is. There is no one-size-fits-all development model for open source, and not all projects use the same development model for their lifetimes. Having a "big bang" public open source release, with development up until then being private, is nothing new. OpenOffice.org and RealNetworks' Helix are two I have personal experience with, back when I was a consultant with CollabNet. Even Mozilla started that way, with the old Netscape Communicator code. Now, in all three cases, the big-drop-then-public approach caused problems (Oo.org is difficult to work with internally, Helix is still somewhat of an afterthought, and Mozilla had to pretty much rebuild from scratch). But, it's not unheard of by any stretch of the imagination. Another example, perhaps more similar to the Android situation, is Eclipse. Eclipse started with a big drop of code from IBM, extracted from WebSphere, then released as open source and moved to public collaborative development. To quote from the Eclipse Web site (http://www.eclipse.org/org/): "The Eclipse Project was originally created by IBM in November 2001 and supported by a consortium of software vendors. The Eclipse Foundation was created in January 2004 as an independent not-for-profit corporation to act as the steward of the Eclipse community." Eclipse wasn't built from the ground up in the public eye; once the initial drop was made, ongoing development then was done publicly. And, despite the fact that there were other open source IDEs around (e.g., NetBeans), Eclipse still grew and thrived. Also, note the gap in time between the initial release (November 2001) and the creation of the Foundation (January 2004) -- per one of your points in an earlier thread, the mere fact that OHA is not a foundation today is also not unheard of. Hence, the mere fact that Android is not open source today, and OHA is not presently an independent entity, does not mean that Google is evil, or the sun won't rise tomorrow, or anything of the sort. It just means they're doing things differently than LiMo is. Now, could a big-drop-then-public approach cause problems for Android? Possibly. That model certainly has a track record filled with potholes. However, only time will tell, history will be the judge, and probably several other cliches I'm not thinking of right now... -- Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy) http://commonsware.com The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development -- coming in June 2008! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" 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-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
