Re: Is Android Intended to _Create_ Fragmentation?

["Kalle Vahlman" <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

2008/4/6, sampo nurmentaus movial fi <sampo nurmentaus movial fi>:
[snip]
>  We gnome folks are of course the good guys fighting the fragmentation
>  of the market place. "We are not evil!" :-)

Yeah, we'll be happy when everybody is using a single platform without
alternatives, most unlike how the OS giant we all love to hate did
it's thing... Oh wait!

(and I'm only half kidding...)

Seriously though, it seems to me that "fragmentation in the market
place" is more a problem when two companies work on (for example) GTK+
but do not coordinate, not that there is a GTK+-based platform and a
Java based platform.

The community that you refer to (assuming it's the OSS one...) already
has embraced the diversity as a good thing and different DE:s,
frameworks and projects are focusing efforts in common base libraries
and specs. For example cairo is starting to be a very common 2D
graphics backend (GTK+, WebKit, Clutter, etc), different freedesktop
specifications are widely implemented and so on. And indeed, also
Android is using some common components under the hood (sqlite,
freetype).

So in my opinion to fight fragmentation you need to embrace diversity,
not create a monopoly.

Considering this, and assuming Google also works with the upstream on
the common libraries and not just their Java API to it, I think
Android is a quite welcome addition to the mobile world. It gives a
viable alternative to those that consider Java the only way to
develop.

As a developer in the mobile field, and as a hacker for such devices,
I can assure you that it's not the multitude of UI frameworks that
hinders the development process. It's the _fragmentation_ of HW
interfaces that hurts the industry most. I strongly believe that if
only HW vendors would embrace _diversity_ and provide proven[1]
interfaces to their devices, the mobile linux industry would really
start to flourish.

[1] either official specs like OpenMAX or de facto standards like
kernel INPUT drivers

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi
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