The importance of Android
So Facebook opened up it’s platform, under a CPAL lisence, basically it’s kind of open source. Please read Chris Messina’s post on it if you want to understand more about the license and how it relates to the founding open source concept.
Most interesting about this though, nobody cares. It could have been an important step for Facebook, but there seems to be little interest from developers weather it’s open source or the original F8 platform.
Then the question is does open source matter or is it just the possibility of hacking and writing apps to an established infrastructure that matters?
The open source movement has both the strength and the weakness of to a great extent being a political movement. Discussing semantics and and details in different licences is excluding a huge mass of people that’s not interested in the details and for that misses the big picture. However as “thought leaders” the movement should never be content and should be pushing the envelope as far as it can. Exactly the same way the Data portability shouldn’t take practical concepts as hurdles but instead working towards a greater vision.
So in on short term I wouldn’t say that Open source or a proprietary platform really matters, if the company can offer a good enough solution in terms of users and incentives, developers, companies or users doesn’t seem to care.
In the long term however the strength of openness is impossible to compete with, the flexibility and co-creation of massive value to open source projects will always out perform the proprietary solution.
An example of this is Google’s Android mobile platform in competition with the iPhone. No doubt Android has had to face some hard criticism but still as they’re approaching a final launch their developers and the community seems to have created functionality and an experience that even the iPhone can’t compete with.
I’m not saying that Apple won’t be a great play in the mobile market for the next 10 years, however what might compete and diminish their potential to reach complete market dominance is the power of open source and how other mobile vendors can use Android to close the gap. Which otherwise would have taken years to close.
A demo video of Android from Google’s I/O conference:
Once again Google comes out on top because they’re open, got a fantastic DNA and makes the right choices over and over again. And of course, I hope SonyEricsson and Nokia understand what this will mean for them. Surely they’ll not be apart of it from the start, my guess is mainly because of egoism, pride and greed. In the long run I can’t find the rationale behind why not to use a piece of software like Android. Can anyone else?
Bloggar.se: Facebook, fbopen, apple, iphone, google, android, mobil
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