Google Fights Back Against Android Fragmentation 373
bonch writes "Google is tightening its control over Android in an attempt to standardize the platform. Licensees must agree to a 'non-fragmentation clause' that gives Google final approval over operating system changes, allegedly sparking complaints to the Justice Department. This follows Google's recent decision to withhold the source to Honeycomb from non-privileged partners, a move that has drawn criticism from openness advocates. Google says that Honeycomb will be open sourced when it's ready for other devices."
The ultimate irony (Score:5, Interesting)
Google wants to close android in order to keep the manufacturers from closing android further.
Openness advocates are fighting to protect the rights of the manufacturers (that of closing Android)
I'm not sure who to root for here, so I'll just say GO LOCAL SPORTS TEAM
Allow fragmentation, but without the trademark (Score:5, Interesting)
Google could reserve the Android trademark for non-fragmented distributions. This would make handset manufactures make the choice between keeping the brand recognition of the Android OS or going it on their own and losing that right and any support that may go with it. The attitude could hurt Google, but it would probably hurt handset manufacturers more as people decide they want the security of a platform with less surprises.
Technically no one can really stop Android from being forked, but at the same time there is nothing stopping Google preventing you from being able to use their trademark.
This is total bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
I smell Microsoft.
Go here [android.com] to download the Android source code. Then read the license here [android.com]:
The preferred license for the Android Open Source Project is the Apache Software License, 2.0 ("Apache 2.0"), and the majority of the Android software is licensed with Apache 2.0. While the project will strive to adhere to the preferred license, there may be exceptions which will be handled on a case-by-case basis. For example, the Linux kernel patches are under the GPLv2 license with system exceptions, which can be found on kernel.org.
As others have already suggested, the FSF friendly way to "gain control of and final say over customization" is through the trademark, not the software license. There is no evidence in this article that this is not the path Google is taking, yet we got a plethora of posts saying "On noes! Google has become evil!".
You know the funny thing? This is yet another example when Google does something very good [slashdot.org] (standing against software patents in this case) and then gets slamed with make-believe charges that they are doing something evil. It is clear, to me at least, that is is just another foray in Microsoft's attacks on Google [groklaw.net] because they know they can't complete technically. It's like this decade's version of what was reported in the Halloween documents [catb.org]