LWN: Comments on "ELC: Android and the community"

ELC: Android and the community

Epicanis — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:31:16 +0000

Reminds me of the "what is it with Linux people?" comment from the "Android Open Source and Compatilibility Lead" in the last thread on this topic. There definitely SEEMS to be a firm cultural attitude at Google that they not entangle themselves with "Linux" more than absolutely necessary.

It sounds an awful lot like Google would rather have android be "not Linux" in some fashion, perhaps instead "based on" Linux in the same way that some Disney movies can be said to be "based on a True Story". I hope this is just me being cynical, though.

ELC: Android and the community

akumria — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:15:03 +0000

Oh, please.

Google's Android was not the first attempt at this, nor will it be the last.

Linux is too compelling for any embedded developer to NOT use.

There is even a question about whether Android is/will be more successful than Nokia/Intel MeeGo.

Both Nokia and Google (indeed any company) will always draw complaints about not handling things as best as they can when dealing with Free Software.

What matters is the response they tend to take -- and are perceived to take.

The perception of Google is:
- ignorance; of the problem
- annoyance; that this is an issue
- defensiveness; why can the engineers directly defend their actions rather than having a "name" (like yourself) wade into the fray.
- defensiveness; other Google people pointing out how they are excellent in some other area. That is fantastic but distracts from this problem area.

The perception of Nokia is:
- acknowledgement; they see the criticism and write up how they perceive they were critisied
- action; they take action in the face of that critisim - not all good - but intended to address the highlighted problem
- feedback; they willingly solicit feedback on their acknowledgement and actions
- review; they do their own review on their actions and feedback

The only way you are going to evolve from one perceived style to another is via active engagement. It will take time, obviously, but a good review point would be six months.

Let's see how things have changed then.

ELC: Android and the community

jeremiah — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:12:25 +0000

Reading between the lines here, it looks like you're all just sling code as fast as you can to meet deadlines and what not. Where as the OSS community generally deals with deadlines a little differently than commercial organizations. There seems to be a little more flexibility in OSS timelines. It can make working with outside people difficult, because you've got problems to solve as opposed to focusing on cleanup, refactoring, and documentation. I'd imagine that a large amount of your communications are offline and in real-space etc. One of the ways we've tried to deal with the internal/external problem is to put someone in charge of it, and only it. Their job is to run around, and figure out WTF is going on, and to make sure that patches and information hit the street faster, without making your over-stressed deep-coders have to worry about it. I'm not saying this is an ideal solution, but might be some food for thought.

ELC: Android and the community

lmb — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:01:20 +0000

The link to Brad's journal is indeed very interesting; thanks for that. It is not without irony to correlate his remedy for why people prefer the Google internal development environment with the discussion here - his request for making Open Source projects more accessible is exactly what people complain about with regard to Android. Foot -> mouth, I think. ;-)

ELC: Android and the community

lmb — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:56:06 +0000

I very recently moved away from a Symbian phone to a Nexus One, partly because (with the exception of MeeGoo, where I didn't find a handset I liked) Android is the closest we currently have to an Open Source environment. I'm throughly impressed with the platform.

It was strange to be paying for applications again after 15 years on Linux! ;-)

I also understand there may be some things like regulatory requirements that make fully open code out of the box a bit difficult in some areas. That's fine, but there are quite a number of areas that shouldn't be affected.

In any case, I encountered a few small bugs - in areas like contact syncing or the mail client, that I thought I could fix. Finding out that the Android code repositories were a few months out of date (and documentation seems to be something that happens to other people) quite put a dent into that.

I could see that, maybe, Google is not actually interested in community contributions; licensing reasons come to mind, or whatever. (Perish the thought that it might be a desire to push people towards paid apps for which Google receives a cut of the transaction.) But, why then make the code fully available at all? What kind of goals are being pursued here?

Sure, for kernel changes, it's a compliance thing. But the whole platform, even code written from scratch, is GPL'ed. I like that, but what's the point? Who benefits from not having a feature-rich calendar or bug-free mailer as part of the base? (Note that the replacement applications I installed for these needs turned out to be free, even without the AdMob crap, so the paid app argument doesn't apply.)

It looks as if Google's position on this platform is somewhat inconsistent, and this creates an expectation mismatch.

ELC: Android and the community

mgedmin — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 18:30:16 +0000

> the WePad demo debacle.

Link?

Something like this

speedster1 — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 06:29:42 +0000

That was classic!

ELC: Android and the community

mdz@debian.org — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:28:11 +0000

In talking with a number of organizations about what's involved in running an open project (hint: more than just licensing), I wrote a blurb at http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2009/10/26/open-vs-open-vs-open-a... to use as a reference.

I think what you're seeing here is people wanting to see Google move more toward the latter end of this continuum.

ELC: Android and the community

Trelane — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:44:13 +0000

Plus, it's hard to winnow out which particular commit broke something; you're stuck with a ginormous monolithic patch. And sadly, not the 2001 type.

It's not quite as bad as tarballs (in the kernel, you'd have to first generate the patch) but it's not far off.

And then the other thing of there are people interested in using the tech in other places (the supercomputing thing in the article above) but are stopped by Google's foot-dragging. This is hardly ideal.

It may be the minimum required, but do you want to just have the minimum pieces of flair?

ELC: Android and the community

rahulsundaram — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:54:28 +0000

I don't think popularity is enough to avoid criticism. On the contrary, look at Apple and the practices with iPhone. Sure, they are damn popular but there are strong critics as well. The Android effort would be ignored rather than criticized if it was not popular. You can be quite happy that so many people care enough about Android to want it to succeed and act as a community well integrated into Linux and working as any other regular open source project rather than it's own world.

ELC: Android and the community

cdibona — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:09 +0000

Other sections:

Antisocial Hackers (password required)
Introverts (0 comments)

ELC: Android and the community

bronson — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:00:07 +0000

Oh, this was meant in good fun. Google's been an outstanding contributor to the industry and open source. (now if we could just get the Android team to avoid source drops...)

A new section?

Front page
Security
Kernel development
Assimilated hackers

ELC: Android and the community

dlang — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:32:39 +0000

in this case 'outside' means people like the linux kernel developers who don't work for google or the companies that you have decided that you care about enough to consider 'inside'.

a community is not a collection of people and companies that you (google) decide should be part of the community. A community is those people _plus_ others from outside that group who have enough interest in the project to participate (and participate may be testing, documentation, and even bikeshedding as well as submitting code)

in the case of the android kernel modifications, there is lots of evidence that people are interested in being part of the android community, but google appears to be saying that you are not interested in allowing those people to be part of what you have defined as the android community.

ELC: Android and the community

dlang — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:25:33 +0000

the common thing about all those communities is that they do more than just code dumps at every release.

they allow people who are not yet part of the project to see what they are doing, including how and why something is done.

if you only do one checkin per release, then you may as well just publish tarballs, a VCS is of limited help.

This is one huge portion of the problem that is being called out.

ELC: Android and the community

cdibona — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:16:26 +0000

Honestly, I'm not sure you can plan your community like that (you can try, but I don't think that's how it works). I consider certain minima to be important:

1) the technical interaction with people outside the project (which we do in spades, but not for every part of the stack)

2) Proper, real, oss licensing so others can even consider taking part without having to contort.

3) An eng staff on the google side that knows that they can work with people outside the company.

What I don't think is my role is to tell the Android team 'you must take a patch' or set some minimum number of patches that must come from 'outside'. They're simply under enough pressure that they don't need me to do that, nor do I think it would be ipso facto reason enough to change what isn't fundamentally broken.

Also, I'm not sure I actually believe in an outside/inside distinction. How is it possible that someone 'outside' can be part of the community? So...."what do you mean by community" is the existential crisis that we must think about, and we should think about it while also making shipping deadlines...

Anyhow, thanks for the kind words regardless. I've tried to not sugar coat this, android and its developers probably are what people want -technically- from a handset project, but there is a clear desire for 'more' that I don't think google will be able to satisfy in the short term. Our priorities are on iterating the os and stack first and everything else second, third and so on.

With hiring and some tweaks of internal processes we might be able to make a few more people happy, so I think that the only thing that will 'fix' this is time. That said, I suspect in 2 years I'll be talking about some practice someone has glommed onto on some google project that they disagree with. But, so long as code is releasing, I'm pretty happy :-)

ELC: Android and the community

cdibona — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:05:32 +0000

Nope, but it is hard to address the concerns of people about the lack of community when in fact there is one. It is difficult to even converse about it when one persons community looks like drupal, while another like samba, while still another like the kernel.

ELC: Android and the community

Trelane — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:36:43 +0000

(to be clear to you here, I'm not a Google hater. I think GOOG is under a smear campaign from MSFT (e.g. on the privacy front) and I try to defend it when I see it come up.

I really want to love Android and Google; lots of good things have come from Google. But it seems to me that in <i>this particular case</i> you don't want anyone from the "outside" (i.e. outside Google and handset OEMs and carriers) to be let in to the party. From the article, it is clear that this is leading to additional work on your end and generally isolation of Google from the rest of, well, everybody who's not in your list of People Google Cares About. I'm apparently in the group of People Google Doesn't Care About (unless you want money from me). I kind of take offense at that.

Please be clear: what kind of community do you wish to foster with Android? This seems like the key point here.

Something like this

man_ls — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:24:46 +0000

The grumpy editor's guide to disappearing inside Goog

ELC: Android and the community

Trelane — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:42:27 +0000

android may not necessarily want to grow a community like that which you might be used to.

What kind of community are you trying to grow?

ELC: Android and the community

Trelane — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:41:33 +0000

some unicorn developer community that everyone seems to have a flavor of in their head.

Is this Official Google Position, that those outside Google and their official partners are a "unicorn developer community"?!

ELC: Android and the community

cdibona — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:16:01 +0000

Which shows someone has let his journal subscriptions lapse. Similarly, we've released upwards of 17m lines of code over the last 5 years. YEs, developers ebb and flow out of open source when they work here. I don't think that matters.

also:

AKPM is a google employee and osdl isn't paying his salary anymore.
Robert Love isn't on the android team.

If you actually are interested in reading further, Brad Fitz wrote the following on the topic:

http://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html

It's pretty insightful.

ELC: Android and the community

cdibona — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:09:53 +0000

No, you're right not unexpected, but disappointing. Android is the closest we as a group (a movement?) have come to a truly free, currently viable, handset under real and permissive licenses, that has brought Linux and open source software into the hands of millions.

ELC: Android and the community

cdibona — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:04:53 +0000

You mean "Creates a lack of community" that you identify with. I don't want to sound ...well..un friendly, but android may not necessarily want to grow a community like that which you might be used to.

Also, I might ask, which communities of -developers- do you admire that you think that android should model on? A standard distribution?

The word community is nearly totally meaningless without describing what you mean, and more importantly in this context, why you think Android should have that kind of community.

From an intake persepctive, they've worked with, solicited and taken a variety of patches from a community of developers outside of google, but most of these come from developers within the handset, carrier and chipset 'community' more so than some unicorn developer community that everyone seems to have a flavor of in their head.

ELC: Android and the community

Trelane — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:28:40 +0000

This is a very interesting discussion, particularly in light of the WePad demo debacle.

ELC: Android and the community

Trelane — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:26:55 +0000

You may not like the way we interact with people who are not at google or the chipset vendors/carriers/handset makers, but it doesn't mean that the work isn't overwhelmingly opensource under real licences that encourage reuse.

Well, it seems pretty clear from the comments here, referenced from here, and the lack of community around Android internals that "you may not like how we do things," when true of a large enough portion of the population, creates a lack of community, which is what's being discussed. I could also make millions of small commits (perhaps changing one letter at a time) or I could strip out all the comments and use arcane symbol names (or use an extremely minority dialect such as Plattdeutsch) but yet have it GPL and your argument above would still apply. The license is a critical piece of the overall picture, but it's only a piece.

ELC: Android and the community

djc — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:15:08 +0000

It just seems sad that the value of all that code is diminished significantly by the lack of a community around it (or actual reviewable changesets, or a bug tracker that gets used by the developers).

And I don't really understand why this is. Sure, one part of it is that you can't disclose things you're doing with secretive hardware partners, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be public code owners for each Android app that I can have a honest discussion with, at least (or ask how they would like me to implement my pet feature).

ELC: Android and the community

rahulsundaram — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:11:43 +0000

Technically what you claim is true but there are community norms and expectations around how open source projects generally work and the culture surrounding that processes. Those are not necessarily written in stone but if you steer away from them, you will continue to be criticized for it. Hardly unexpected.

ELC: Android and the community

cry_regarder — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:34:17 +0000

Also look at "Google and the Mystery of the Disappearing AI Researcher"

ELC: Android and the community

bronson — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:17:00 +0000

This would make an awesome LWN article. "Google and the Mystery of the Disappearing Open Source Hackers."

Hoping someone with a keen sense of humor could write it.

ELC: Android and the community

cdibona — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:56:57 +0000

That's kind of bs. Open source software is software released under open source licenses. You may not like the way we interact with people who are not at google or the chipset vendors/carriers/handset makers, but it doesn't mean that the work isn't overwhelmingly opensource under real licences that encourage reuse.

ELC: Android and the community

lutchann — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:14:18 +0000

Many of the people I know who work for Google disappeared from their social circles as soon as they joined the company. It seems Google is exceptionally good at getting their people to trade their personal lives for their jobs. It's sad; otherwise I would be a lot more interested in working for them.

ELC: Android and the community

zooko — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:42:13 +0000

I suspect Andrew Morton and Ted T'so have unique arrangements with Google. In fact, is OSDL actually still *funding* Andrew Morton? This article -- http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2006080303126NWCYKN -- says that OSDL was funding him and Digeo was just providing him an office to work in so that he didn't have to work from home, and that once he joined Google "His relationship with OSDL is unchanged.".

I know a couple of Free/Open Source hackers who have disappeared into the google black hole. It makes me sad. Not only do they stop contributing patches to open source projects, they also stop blogging and otherwise just disappear from the Net.

ELC: Android and the community

tialaramex — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:48:32 +0000

When you've designed a complicated piece of consumer electronics you send off for the first boards to be made, and at that point what you have is a non-functional object.

You know it should be able to display an animating clock, play a movie, read SD cards, etc. but it just sits there.

The process of getting it so that it'll do something is "bringing it up". This is where you find out any hardware problems that weren't in the simulation. If you're very good or very lucky there won't be too many, but there will be a few. Your objective is to check that all the intended features are there, and any problems can be worked around, or else you re-design and go around the loop again. A command line app that can detect the touch sensor raw output proves that's wired up correctly for example, no need to wait for the whizzy UI that'll use it.

Usually the software that's eventually supposed to run on this device does not yet exist. Probably the schedule says it will be available "next week" but it said that last month too. Even when it does exist, it is untested, and the combination of untested hardware and untested software is a recipe for frustration. So using Linux for "bring up" even when you intend to develop something in-house for the finished consumer product could make sense.

ELC: Android and the community

wookey — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:34:28 +0000

It means initial bringup, when the new hardware arrives and you're not sure what works and what doesn't. You sit a hardware engineer down with a kernel hacker and they try to work out who's fault it is that things are broken. Hours of fun...

ELC: Android and the community

mcon147 — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:02:52 +0000

what does it mean specifically to "bring up their phones" ?
From those words it sounded like booting

ELC: Android and the community

morganr — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:12:44 +0000

Well I imagine the engineers at apple compile a linux kernel for their ARM-based system-on-chip that allows them access to all of its in-built devices. Starting with a known-good kernel/toolchain when debugging the hardware is a good idea! In the future they may well be able to use the iPhone OS to do this, if the HW stays close enough to previous versions.

ELC: Android and the community

juriise — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:04:13 +0000

"In an aside, he noted that all phone manufacturers bring up their phones using Linux, including Apple with the iPhone; "a little-known fact". "

How can this be correct?

ELC: Android and the community

svkelley — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 07:37:29 +0000

Agree, Android's user space is a dead zone of code drops out of some black hole inside Google through Perforce...

ELC: Android and the community

djc — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 07:09:13 +0000

I hate the lack of community around Android. It's open source without the open source.

ELC: Android and the community

leiz — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:11:54 +0000

Counter examples: Andrew Morton, Ted Tso. Plenty of Googlers are active in the Linux (and open source) community. I.e. http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/04/google-at-l...