Its useless to build a cool house (android) and give permission for others to freely copy and improve the house and give it to others, but then say "you can't give away the furnace (gmail), plumbing (market), or electric system (gmaps) with this house because its our personal cool furnace, plumbing, and electric, or we'll stomp on you".
Sure the "community" could come up with replacements for Gmail, Market, and GMaps, but I bet the Google lawyers would figure out how to stomp on those as well, probably from an intellectual property, look-and-feel, or other angle. You know, if its "open source" then it should all be open source. I am extremely disappointed with Google's handling of this. Of course I agree with them that someone not Google shouldn't be able to give away those apps for free, but who's paying for them here? Aren't they already distributed with android? How can something "open" contain "proprietary" stuff that can't be distributed? Then the whole thing isn't open, period. If one thing has this legal anchor, the whole thing does. Then Google should stop pimping it as "open", "freely distributed", etc. Even if they're not actually saying that, that's sure the perception "out there", and perception is fact. Google got all the good PR from being behind android, making it sound like a fresh new thing that's better than the iPod OS or Windows cause "anyone can do anything with android, look how cool Google is". What cracks me up is that from 10000 feet up the solution to this whole thing seems so damn simple. Make GMail, GMaps, an upgraded Market (sorry the one that's part of the original distro and up to 4.0.4 of CyanogenMod is a sad excuse of an app for even an entry level coder, much sadder for a giant "innovator" such as Google. My 11 year old daughter even laughs at it.), and whatever else app that Google has its corporate panties in such a bunch about such a fit about, and make them separately installable from the "open source" part of android. Then its up to ROM devs such as Cyanogen to make sure their ROM can run the latest version of these apps, and Google can keep their precious proprietary apps tightly hidden away in their ivory towers, and the community can modify the operating system itself to make it actually good above and beyond the version that Google released. Shoot, me myself only have use for Google Maps and the Market (and only for those apps that I can only get via the market, other than that I stay away from that "thing"), so Cyanogen and those that think outside of the Google box, please continue to give me a highly optimized, fast, capable, root-accessible, save-apps-to-SD-built-in, tetherable, and most of all, actually-usable-above-and-beyond-the-base- android-that-almost-made-me-punt-and-go-iPhone-that-came-with-my-G1. That's open source. Use the brains, ingenuity, and skills of the community to make what you did better. Don't do this stupid. All I know is if I have to go back to my old ROM I'll drop android cause in its former guise it's not a viable OS for anything remotely device-challenging. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
