How dare they! And how dare Linus Torvalds "dump" Linux on the industry, or Mozilla "dump" Firefox. They should be required by law to charge high fees!
I wouldn't rush to that analogy. Microsoft dumped IE and we mostly agree that that was kind of dirty. From another angle, Google is trying to leverage one monopoly in order to break into another, and they did it by poorly copying the iPhone.
There aren't really any "good guys" in this picture, but I at least give Microsoft a nod for trying (and failing) to do something different.
There really are good guys and bad guys here. Lumping them all together is false equivalence.
Google isn't "dumping" by giving Android away for free. They have a different business model, and it makes money. It also keeps the competition sharp. Nothing wrong with that.
What's shitty is that Microsoft and Apple are doing everything in their power to delay and destroy innovation for their own benefit.
Google's actions have accelerated innovation. Android has been good for customers, good for Google, and good for the industry.
Innovation happens when people can build on the efforts of others, and has been so for the entire history of man. Any system that puts up road blocks to sharing and propagating ideas inhibits innovation.
The justification for patents in software as providing shelter for inventors to work on their inventions while releasing the details of how they work is complete and utter bullshit and has been so for a long time. First, the way people share inventions in software is by publishing papers in journals, at conferences, or by shipping software, so that their peers benefit. No I know of has ever used a patent database or patent pending database as a search engine for knowledge sharing.
Secondly, software is shipped and revised so fast, and the time for patents to be granted, and successfully litigated in court, is so long, that more than enough time already exists for inventors to recoup their investments. It could take a decade or more to go from software patent application to successful litigation, so the idea that the patent protection is needed to shelter you while your startup executes is nonsense.
As far as I can tell, software patents serve one purpose and one purpose only: to inhibit and restrict competitors, or to shakedown successful companies with deep pockets.
These were defensive lawsuits and you know it. When you're attacked by patent trolls, the only option is to counter sue with a similar patent troll attack. Think mutual assured destruction nuclear style. But I'm sure you're aware of that and just being disingenuous to make your point.
IE wasn't released unbundled from the OS as source for anyone to fork, so it's a false equivalence. If IE was released like Firefox/Mozilla was, no one would be complaining.
It was bundled, not dumped. But the bundle had more impact than an independent "dump". So, by substance if not by form, it is a comparable analogy. MS did not want to get shut out of desktop browser. Goog did not want to get shut out of mobile browser. They were both playing the same move strategically. Give away that which my enemey needs to sell to survive....
MS could not get shut out of the browser desktop market, period, there was zero chance of that ever happening, since they controlled the platform, >90% of the market. iOS is a locked down ecosystem, if iOS wanted to block Google ads, or change the default search engine, they could do it and Google would have no recourse. Big difference.
Note, Android allows Firefox, even as a default browser for opening links. That's impossible on iOS and on Windows RT.
I don't have any problem with people shipping free software, even Microsoft. The issue is whether consumers and developers have choices.
Microsoft didn't get in trouble for "dumping" IE. They got in trouble for trying to make IE an integral component of Windows which would have made other browsers unusable or unnecessarily cumbersome to use.
No, Google wanted a platform that prevented Microsoft and Apple from completely controlling and owning the onramp to the mobile web with two dominant proprietary operating systems that prevent third party software installs without approval, a huge huge reduction in freedom even comparing it to Microsoft in the 90s. And in that regard, they did the world a favor, regardless of whether it was selfish or altruistic.
It doesn't matter how you try to downplay it. Google shipped a huge useful chunk of kernel changes to Linux, plus a mature, ready, out of the box piece of open source that anyone can fork and use as a foundation to make another free OS, like FireOS, Tizen, FirefoxOS, etc, and they successfully got a platform deployed on a huge number of devices around the world that don't completely lock down who can install what.
Even if they had completely evil motives, good has come out of it. If you're a rabid fanboy who wanted Steve Job's platform to have a monopoly on mobile, it's depressing for you, but it's liberating for everyone else.
Google wanted a platform that prevented Microsoft and Apple from beating them to control of the next big advertising platform.
Nothing more, nothing less. "Open" has been shown conclusively to take a back seat to monetization. It is as much a marketing tactic (in the sense that it's useful to promote the platform, but can and will be discarded, with spin to explain why, when its usefulness decreases) as anything in Microsoft's or Apple's ads.
And it doesn't matter how you try to downplay it: companies other than Google have, whether they intended to or not, accomplished undeniable good through things they've shipped. Apple, for example, has contributed monumentally to LLVM, which is a large and useful public good. But it did so more or less explicitly to screw the GPL.
So, faced with all the major players doing this in some form or another, how, precisely, do you plan to rank them relative to each other in order to discern which one is "good" or at least "least bad"?
I give Apple props for for their contributions to LLVM or WebKit (and OpenCL, and Darwin), no one is saying they haven't done any good things for the ecosystem, but that doesn't erase the egregious damage that the iOS T&C impose on the ability of people to do what they want with their devices. To me, that ranks them lower. That, and the aggressive "thermonuclear" offensive litigiousness they have, not just on patents, but even going back to the Look-and-Feel lawsuit of the 90s. I'm an Apple fan boy when it comes to their hardware, I've owned every Apple device, I own an iPhone 5S, the A7 is remarkable. I love the hardware, I hate the closed nature of the platform, the fact that I need to jailbreak my device to have ownership of it.
For the average consumer, control of "the next big advertising platform" is a meaningless abstraction, it matters to people in the ad buying business, not consumers who generally don't like ads in the first place, and tolerate them mostly to get free stuff. And how does Android "control" mobile web advertising anyway?
But for the average consumer, telling them they can't install App X on their device that they spent $300 on because Apple censors don't like it is much more direct.
No company is perfect, but I can say as a Googler, your cynicism is basically wrong, that open source isn't just a marketing tactic, but that the rank and file at the lowest levels of the company, culturally believe in it. Google has disappointed in the past on the degree of openness, and there is much to improve, so I am not uncritical of it in this regard, but if you were to query the rank of file of Microsoft and Apple with regards to open source, and Googlers, you'd find a lot more zealots at Google.
The world isn't black and white, it's shades of gray, and some are just a much brighter shade of gray than others.
I'd go so far as to say that Windows RT is more open than iOS-with Windows RT you have built in Windows Explorer, and command line access. And a non crippled browser (desktop IE 11 vs mobile Safari).
Given the context of this discussion, it must be mentioned that LLVM license do not include a patent grant. Apple has patented several frontends of LLVM, and is likely to have several patents on the core parts of LLVM. Apple could do a oracle at any time.
"and is likely to have several patents on the core parts of LLVM"
While I work for Google, and was involved in the CPTN and Rockstar stuff (and thus can't comment on this article at all, though I wish I could), i can actually point out that this statement is not right.
First, companies that wish to contribute to LLVM are asked to non-assert patents involved in their contributions. This is covered in the dev policy, and has been for a long time. Their are non-assertions/grants on file for a number of companies now.
As for whether Apple owns any patents on LLVM core, Chris Lattner himself told me Apple held none, which is why they had not filed a non-assertion.
Apple may or may not hold patents on LLVM code that is not "in tree" (so yes, they may have non-public frontends or backends they own patents on), and I never specifically asked about the clang frontend, but I trust Chris enough to know that if there was in-project code, be it clang or core or whatever, he would have followed the dev policy and Apple would have non-asserted them.
While thats nice and all, Apple has made no binding or even public statement to that fact. They also have at least one patent which mention LLVM by name (Converting javascript into a device-independent representation), even if that "just" is a frontend.
There is simply nothing that prevents apple from using patents against LLVM users. We can only hope that none of their numerous vaguely written patents cover any technology used by LLVM or any of their frontends like Clang.
