EGCS days? Ha!

Posted Oct 21, 2011 18:46 UTC (Fri) by dbruce (guest, #57948)
In reply to: EGCS days? Ha! by khim
Parent article: Andy Rubin: Android 4.0 to be open sourced by year end (The H)

"we can not be sure about timings but if we'll use GCC timeline, for example, then Google Android will rule till about 2016 - when it'll slowly be eclipsed by different kinds of bazaar-like forks."

You're omitting one very big difference - look at the financial and engineering resources of Google vs. those of the GNU project. If Google continues to develop Android seriously, there is no way any open source fork is going to "eclipse" it.

Not really convincing...

Posted Oct 21, 2011 22:08 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

You're omitting one very big difference - look at the financial and engineering resources of Google vs. those of the GNU project. If Google continues to develop Android seriously, there is no way any open source fork is going to "eclipse" it.

If you don't believe that other companies can ever eclipse Google then it just means that bazaar development will be pointless. But I don't believe that. Yes, Google is about 10 times larger then, for example, RedHat. But Android is not the main Google product and RedHat is not the only company which can decide to develop it. As long as there are important features which can be attractive for all (or at least most) users Google can keep the lead. But there are only so much you can do in this context. At some point you'll ran out of "big" features and "small" features will matter. At this point no single company (not even Google or Microsoft) can compete. You can only fight using courts and format lockins - both venues are not possible for the free software where you can always use yesteryear version to achieve pretty good compatibility.