Eating our young

Google is a big company with a diverse set of managers and developers that run the gamut from "FOSS veteran" to "FOSS skeptic". While Google invites a higher standard applied to itself (that whole "do no evil" thing), it's going to be really difficult to get a batch of people that large to agree on what the "right" thing to do is.

That's not to say that critiques are unwarranted. However, uncharitable, whiny, and entitled screeds like this do the FOSS community no favors. We can't keep them from getting written, but we don't need to give them a bullhorn either. This type of vitriol and assumptions of bad faith should be reserved for patent trolls and other true enemies of FOSS, not for the people that are merely just not doing it right. We can't expect others to follow in Google's footsteps if this is the treatment we heap on Google.

Android, for all of its faults as an "open" platform, is way more open than the norm (iPhone/MacOS, Symbian [for now], Blackberry, and the plethora of other mobile OSs). As FOSS goes from success-to-success, there's going to be more competitive pressure on Google to open up their development processes. For now, though, the competition is largely proprietary.

Android is a new project, and Google has a lot of very smart people, so it's hard to imagine they won't evolve their community processes. If they don't, my presumption is that the licensing is such that a fork can be viable. So, the competitive pressure will come soon enough. In the meantime, let's not eat our young.