Thread: The dream: Qt on Android
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wmarone is offline wmarone
2011-02-23 , 22:16
Posts: 1,746 | Thanked: 2,100 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#24
Originally Posted by Capt'n Corrupt View Post
But it doesn't. This is entirely too extreme a statement to be taken seriously. You yourself alluded to the increased ease of interoperability between BSD and Linux, which implies that there is a degree of interoperability (which BTW has been demonstrated) between Linux and Android. That it is less practical is another story, but it's not as though Android is firewalled from '30 years of development'.
It is not, inherently, walled off. It is practically, however.

You know I'm not talking about Google as a tribe, but referring to the staunch fanboism that, like clockwork, rears its head when something challenges the status quo with something different.
When that challenger is, as a whole, less open and less compatible with what exists I can see why people might be annoyed at the newcomer claiming that they're "open."

I know you're accusing me of being a "fanboi," but there's a massive, massive world of open source full of innovation that existed before Android came around that doesn't work with it due to the decisions of a closed source company that Google bought.

Bionic isn't an innovation over glibc, for instance, but it was proprietary to start. And that's why it exists. Same for the GUI and tied rendering engine, and for Dalvik.

Lack of profile? Ahem, Nokia.

I don't think that linux's adoption failings can be trivialized quite so simply.
They can. Nokia never gave Maemo the profile it needed to take off, nor did they give the development teams the freedom or support required. A base GNU/Linux system could easily be coupled with a good UI, there is nothing inherent about such a system that holds it back.

The source is open. I think you're talking about the release methodology.
Release methodology, development methodology. They are very closed and secretive about things going forward, unlike most major open source projects. Just because the source is open means nothing, I can get source code for operating systems pretty much anywhere. Whether the project is open enough that participation doesn't require being a Google partner is another question entirely (as end-users can participate in the AOSP, but not Android.)

Certainly even the basement OSS developer source remains 'closed' until it's committed to the tree.
Well the "basement" developer might not have anyone watching what they do or work with anyone else. But major projects tend to hold discussions over mailing lists, maintain public svn/git repos and make available changes on a daily basis (instead of monster dumps after devices with the hardware hit the market.)

A lot of my problem with Android is that it stems from a closed source project that adopted the Linux kernel out of convenience, and Google said "we're open source" but added a whole bunch of conditions to that "openness" that are simply alien to pretty much every project.

No one has issues with innovation, and yes there is silly tribalism. But whether Android is truly innovative (since the whole point of using Dalvik seems to have failed to deliver) remains to be seen, and its lack of openness compared to pretty much everything else that is open is plain as day. Saying "it's innovative and your opposition is just fanboyism" isn't a way to sell your argument.
Last edited by wmarone; 2011-02-23 at 22:18.
 

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