Android's "Non-Fragmentation Agreement"

superglaze writes "The biggest doubt cast over Android (whose SDK was released yesterday) has been the fact that much of it is licensed under Apache. There have been worries that manufacturers might fork the code road in a non-interoperable kind of way. I.e., they would have no obligation to feed back code to the wider Open Handset Alliance, or even tell the other members what alterations have been made. However, it turns out that Google made all the members sign a 'non-fragmentation agreement' to make sure everything works with everything. In theory at least. 'All of the partners have signed a non-fragmentation agreement saying they won't modify [the code] in non-compatible ways ... That is not to say that a company that is not part of the OHA could not do so.' Google's spokesperson highlighted the historical dangers of working with Java, the programming language that lies at the heart of Android. 'One of the current problems with mobile Java development is that Java has fragmented ... Java virtual machines have fragmented, but all the members of the OHA have agreed to use one virtual machine that can run script in Java'"

Que?

How is this google vs apache? I don't understand (its early and I'm feeling fuzzy headed so forgive me). Google is using an apache license to release this... other than that I don't see asf involvement in the project. Maybe I'm missing something here? This article talks about all the involved parties signing an additional agreement separate from the license agreeing not do what MS did to Java before being sued.

So... how is this google vs apache?

Pretty cool start

I took a look at the SDK yesterday and some of the videos - having done windows mobile development it looks like it will be almost as easy and have a number of similar features.

My concern with all of this though - is that there is no hardware available.

One of the things about emulators is that they run really fast, much faster than the actual hardware runs - so it's hard to tell how responsive an application will be. So given that google has been plowing ahead on development but not been testing on real hardware, one has to wonder if things are going to get seriously challenging when they move to hardware...

Perhaps they want to avoid symbians mistake?

Symbian was developed on hardware, on the lowest hardware then available so that it would be sure to run on everything. This made the design obsolete at launch and now it is so archaic(?) that people really resent that original decesion.

Perhaps Google wants to avoid this. Wants apps that push the hardware requirements so that the Android phones will HAVE to be powerhouses, and it doesn't get trapped in the symbian or even MS trap of having to work on the cheapest shit some company can throw together.

Apparently (I only have this from hearsay) symbian phones often miss basic hardware capabilties that drive a pc programmer up the wall because he suddenly has to code for features that have been present in PC's from the dawn of computing.

All google now has to do, is convince mobile phone makers that it is in their best interest to make their phones capable of actually running the software currently being developed.

Don't forget mobile tech moves fast but is expensive. If the companies could get away with yesterdays tech they would. That ain't good for us consumers, we want them to be pushed so we finally get some fully capable smart phones and not the same crippled yunk they have pushing on us.

Revisionism?

One of the current problems with mobile Java development is that Java has fragmented ... Java virtual machines have fragmented

Whoa, he-llo? That's a rather interesting (and bold!) statement to be making there. I don't know if Google has noticed, but J2ME phones all run the same code and the same APIs. Issues between phones almost always come down to working around JVM implementation bugs. Which isn't that huge of a deal when you consider that "porting" then becomes a straightforward matter of applying a minor patch between "versions". (Often you can just inline the workarounds and have a single version that works everywhere.)

Meanwhile, Google has created a JVM that's not actually a JVM, that's incompatible with the J2ME/MIDP standard, and then has the gall to claim they're the solution to a more or less non-existent problem? That's ballsy even for Google. :-/

Re:Revisionism?

but J2ME phones all run the same code and the same APIs. Issues between phones almost always come down to working around JVM implementation bugs

This is just plain wrong. Once you start looking at graphics, audio, keyboard input, bluetooth, gps, network, photo or video capture or anything beyond very basic apps, you reach the murky world of JSRs, which are bits of java that may or may not be included in a particular j2me installation. If they are included, many of them have lots left up to the implementation to decide, for example MMAPI leaves it up to the implementation whether to support MIDI sound, whether to support playing audio directly from code rather than from a file, whether to support recording, what file formats to support etc. You can't even reliably play audio files across platforms, let alone do interesting things like get at the camera, get video frames etc.

Nokia phones for example, most will let you grab a single frame from the camera, some won't, but you can't grab multiple video frames without a 1/4 second delay per frame, whereas motorola phones, many will not let you at the camera at all, but those that will, will let you record multiple frames properly, except for a few which will only let you take single frames.

Oh, FORK!!!

Sounds to me like they don't want anyone forking it.

This is not as bad as Tivo ... or is it?

Non-fragmentation my you-know-what.

Re:Oh, FORK!!!

Sounds to me like they don't want anyone forking it.

Read it again. The members can't fork the development. Non-members can. They're just trying to prevent the situation where, 5 years down the line, NTT says "thanks for all the hard work Google, but now that we've achieved brand loyalty, we're going to stop working on our competitor's OS." The idea is to make the cell phone OS a commodity and let cell phone makers focus on higher level features that will work on any phone.

Re:Oh, FORK!!!

Riiight - but who are these potential non-members? Its not like you can have half you development team be members, and the other half non-members.

And its not like there's a huge field when it comes to cell phone manufacturers. There's not thousands of different manufacturers, so google starts out with a de facto quasi-monopoly.

So even if a fork came along that was better, the companies can't use it.

No wonder Microsoft is afraid google will be the next Microsoft - they're using Microsofts' playbook.

GPL solves these problems

I agree that the use of the Apache licence is the biggest problem with Android.

If Android had just used the GPL (which prohibits forking), then this problem would have avoided. There are lots of examples to back this up. For example, if Emacs had used the GPL, instead of the Apache licence, the XEmacs fork would never have occurred. And if Gnome and KDE would both switch to using the GPL licence, then the projects would just magically merge into one, and we wouldn't have the duplication of effort and lack of standards that you currently see on the Linux desktop.

Oh, wait... (consults Google). Never mind.

Google is EVIL!!! (for your convenience)

Lets just get it over with - all "GOOG is the AntiChrist" posts please file under this one, so as to have a neat and orderly flamefest.

Brought to you by the Lawful Neutral alignment since 1984 - "I don't care what you do, just as long as it's in a neat and orderly fashion"

Android? Non-fragmentation?

Say it isn't so! It's all these guys [wikipedia.org] can do!

If portable Java fragmented

...it is largely because cellphone mfgs are so tightly wedded to telecoms that they have little interest in offering a platform that attracts 3rd party development.

Open up the network, as Google is proposing, and mfgs have to compete more in terms of coherent feature sets and what 3rd party apps they can attract.

Gist of the Apache license: Anyone?

Can a kind Slashdotter educate an ignorant soul about the gist of the Apache license? I sincerely would like to know.

Hype again for nothing?

I don't know about you others, but I seriously think that Android is over hyped. Yes, it's Linux based platform for mobile devices, but so what? There's already Maemo, but you don't see it hyped to death. Yes, the Android can also run Java ME applications, so what? All mobile phones can run Java ME applications...

And one last thing... there are no devices yet! No nothing! And you know what, there probably won't be even many of them. If you look at the alliance that Google has put together, the only serious vendors are Motorola and Samsung. But hey hey hey, Motorola just bought half of UIQ from Sony-Ericsson. UIQ is an user interface used primarily by Sony-Ericsson on top of Symbian. How serious Motorola is about Android when they have just made an serious investment into an Symbian company? And Samsung... they are just as much flip flopping as Motorola.

You know I'm not saying that you should not discuss about Android or not develop applications to it. I just say that Android seems to be again an over hyped thing. If I would be developing mobile applications running native in a phone, I would be damn sure that there is adequate installation base before jumping in, otherwise it could be very well be just seriously wasted time.

Java is simple to decompile

So long as the person fragmenting the platfrom hasn't used a Java obfuscator then it would be incredibly easy to decompile the bytecode back to Java source.

Prize money

Sorry, that I go to a different subject, but do I miss something?

(50 * $25.000) + (10 * $100.000) + (10 * $275000) = $5 million
Where are the $10 million ???

Wait a sec...

'All of the partners have signed a non-fragmentation agreement saying they won't modify [the code] in non-compatible ways

To me that reads as they could close off the code and fork it into a proprietary monster as long as everything is still 100% compatible with the Google framework (user apps run correctly, etc).

So you still can't modify the source code on your phone and run the changes. I bet they are still going to lock down the phone software with DRM (Example.. Motorola A1200)

Developers, Developers, Developers

"We've built some interesting applications for Android, but the best applications are not here yet, and that's because they're going to be written by developers,"

It seems that most of Skyne^WGoogle's code has been written by robots so far. WATCH OUT!

Toolkit Fragmentation != Device Fragmentation

Wow, that was quick. I posted an hour ago on the other thread about my worries about Device Fragmentation.

IMHO the differences in the J2ME API is not the main issue for a developer. Differences in screen size, processing power and keypad layout is much more important.

Is google going to force 240x320 (or whatever) on everyone? Is it going to prevent a manufacturer to heavily customize the look and feel? Are we going to have a split between devices having a touch screen and devices not having it?

so...

One Java to rule them all?

Re:Java? Fragmented?

I'm going to lose all my karma points, but here goes...

From this (and other comments in the previous postings about Android), one might get the impression that the people at Google are a bunch of idiots who just didn't do any basic research. Why, if only they had read Slashdot occasionally, they'd know that Java is slow, has 10^6 different versions, is very slow, is inferior to C++, is extremely slow, takes up too much memory, is abominably slow, is a programming language that no real programmer uses any more, and in general is teh sux0rz. <grin/>

Re:Java? Fragmented?

behaving rather bizarrely by on the one hand warning about the problems of forking and then on the other releasing their own JVM Dalvik instead of using JavaME.

You've never written a JavaME (J2ME) app, have you? Getting a J2ME application to work properly on all phones is a huge nightmare. Just when you have it working on your phone, and all of your coworkers phones, you try it on your wife's phone, and find that it completely doesn't work. There's plenty of fragmentation just within J2ME, and it's made worse by the fact that it's almost impossible to test an application on every different phone that's out there. If Google can come up with an SDK that makes "write once run anywhere" a reality in the mobile world, I'm all for it.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

That's fine, but you're avoiding the central point: Google are causing further fragmentation and forking within Java at a time when there are significant efforts being made to re-unify and stabilize the platform. Also they've chosen a license which has the potential to allow leachers to benefit from any work anyone does on the distributed code. A pity that they didn't put their efforts into improving J2ME instead.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

'Write once, run anywhere'. Hmm, I'm a java programmer and have been for 10 years. I know, as every java developer knows and realises, it actually means 'write once, run on the important places'. Meaning something that works on your desktop PC will also work on the Solaris server you intend to deploy it to.

Mostly people who use 'but I thought you said run ANYWHERE' argument should actually try to think about what that would mean in real terms. For example, should you expect a huge Swing application or something like Weblogic 9 to run on your 8 year old J2ME phone? Be sensible please...

Re:Java? Fragmented?

No idea why you got modded off topic. You are correct. Normal J2ME commands will work across all phones. It is when you get into graphics or messing with screen resolution that you have to be aware of different devices. That is why you can get emulators for different screen/phones and test.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

Whoever modded him offtopic was either being childish or desperate to hide the information. Probably just a fanboy.

Reading further on this, the interesting thing about Dalvik is that it's a non-Sun-controlled JVM. The thing about JavaME (aka PhoneME) is that although it (like JavaSE and JavaEE (Glassfish)) is released under GPLv2 [linuxdevices.com], there is no exception clause [java.net] (there is for JavaSE). This means that you can only run GPLv2 code on PhoneME. Obviously Google and it's partners didn't like this, so they wrote their own JVM. In order to avoid infringing on Sun's IP they've made the bytecode unique to Dalvik. So Java goes in ---> Dalvik bytecode comes out, runs on Dalvik. Very clever.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

Isn't the scenario above EXACTLY what this non-fragmentation agreement should help to avoid? Seems like a reasonable way to ensure device compatibility to me. If a non-OHA entity fragments the code, that's fine, because their code/app/SDK/whatever isn't guaranteed to run on all of the devices anyway. If some hobbyists want to create their own derivative platform for device X, they're perfectly free to do so. Seems like all of the benefits of the open source model to me.

Re:Google versus Apache

In a strange kind of way, this is Google versus Apache. Or, commercial versus non-commercial. I know that this is a ridiculous simplification but it kind of smells that way to me.

How exactly? I don't see it that way

Google releases all their open source under the Apache license. I'm sure they have various reasons for choosing the Apache license, but I'd wager a major one is that it is very business friendly. They most likely understand what a pain it can be to include OSS products that are licensed under a different licensing scheme in a commercial product.

With Andriod, you are free...

to develop in non-java. Of course, it may not work on ALL handsets (in fact, all but certain that it will not). But if you do the work in Java, AND use their API, it is being guaranteed to work across all of the handsets. So, what is your gripe?

Re:Linus is right

So why do people keep adopting it.

      For the same reason people keep voting for the same old corrupt politicians?

Re:Google versus Apache

In a strange kind of way, this is Google versus Apache.

I really don't think it is. This is Google taking the Apache license and then fixing a major perceived weakness in it, at least within the context of their application (creating a single, uniform, mobile platform). And even then, they're not really restricting the software; they're just getting the people who are part of their trade group to agree not to stab each other in the back.

It's not Google "versus" anything or anyone, except perhaps maybe the closed-source phone manufacturers. Certainly not Apache.

Re:Google versus Apache

Apache. While Google does have the mantra "Do No Evil", you must remember, they are a corporation. Their goal is to make money. While they are good now, down the road, you can't be sure. The heart of the system is always corporate gain. The heart of Apache is public gain.

Re:Linus is right

I am with Linus on this one. For the life of me I can't understand what this sucking up to RMS is about. Linus himself does not think GPLv3 is a good thing. So why do people keep adopting it.
Without Linus FOSS is tossed. Not following Linus is dangerous for the survival of FOSS.

What are you getting on about?

Look, I know I'm going after a sacred cow around here, but if Linus had decided to do something else with his time instead of Linux, it wouldn't have been nearly as big a deal as you're making it out to be. He was the right person, at the right time, satisfying a very specific need, namely for a freely-licensed OS kernel. In the worst-case scenario, the whole thing would have been set back a year or two, waiting on the BSD kernel. More likely, I think somebody else from the MINIX community might have done it (who knows, maybe Andrew Tanenbaum might have done it himself, had he not gotten in a pissing match with Torvalds). We'll never really know, but the key point is that Linux was evolutionary; it was what was needed at the time, it was there first, and it gained traction as a result. (And at least early on, it wasn't all that great from a software engineering perspective; it was the license that distinguished it from technologically superior alternatives, not the other way around.)

But the fact that the demand for a free kernel existed at all is due to a whole lot of other people, and I'm not sure why you'd give Linus' opinion more weight than you'd give to the people who created the license that made Linux successful.

What the fuck?

I could go into all the reasons you're shortsighted, wrong, and really a fanboy -- is sucking up to Linus so much better than sucking up to RMS?

But I have a bigger question. What the fuck does the GPLv3 have to do with Android?

Someone slap this tool with -1 offtopic, please.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

Mod parent down.

The first comment to any article about Java on slashdot is by someone who always trolls Java as Anonymous Coward.

What about java's promise of 'write-once, run anywhere'..more like, write-once, maintain 5 different versions of the JRE, each at 100Mb+.

That's up to the SUN Java Runtime Environment developers not the public that codes in Java

Seems fitting that with most cellphones these days, being nothing more than over-priced toys, that just happen to be able to occasionally make and receive calls, that they use a fragmented, broken toy programming language.

Toy? Where have you been, it's been a "toy" in japan since the late 90s. The United States is just now catching up to the innovations of the cellular phone in Japan.

This is the age of information and there are many that want information on the go or entertainment while waiting for the bus.

Re:Java? Fragmented?

I'll stick to a basic phone, and follow the *NIX philosophy, "just does one thing, and do it well", thank you very much.

You have perfectly described Apple philosophy, not *NIX. *NIX is more like "do as many things as you want to do". The fact that Apple uses *nix to a large extent, and has put it on a phone, while at the same time some of these same tools help run huge render farms, workstations on different architectures, datacenters, embedded devices, routers, etc.. ad nauseam -- just goes to show the versatility of *NIX.