Re: Lefty doesn't mince words about Android

["David \"Lefty\" Schlesinger" <lefty access-company com>]

Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Lefty doesn't mince words about Android:
>   
Yeah, there's a shock.

Actually, I was amazed at how thoroughly this particular reporter 
misreported not only what I said, but who I _was_. This, in spite of 
being in possession of a business card, which I personally handed here 
(after she butted into another conversation I was in the middle of with 
another journalist, introducing herself by saying that she'd only 
managed to wander in "halfway through" my talk. Sigh.)

I felt obliged to add the following comment to the story there:

======================

1. My employer is ACCESS, not "the FOSS firm Open Source Technologies". 
My title at ACCESS is Director of Open Source Technologies.

2. I didn’t “publicly question” whether it was "appropriate" for Google 
to do Android: I said that the bottom line for Google was that they were 
an advertising company, and anything they did ultimately came back to that.

3. I didn't say Google had "done nothing", just the contrary: I said 
that as near as it was possible to tell, they were the _only_ member of 
OHA who'd done any significant work on Android.

I _did_ say that throwing a million lines of never-before-seen code at 
"the open source community" will prove to be a disappointing experience 
for Google. The existing open source communities don't want huge code 
dumps, and especially not of code that is completely unrelated to the 
mainstream of open source development. It's not as though the folks who 
work on GTK+ are going to suddenly drop that in order to maintain 
"Surface Manager" on Google's behalf.

(When it's released under the Apache license, whenever phones finally 
ship--probably in 2009, from all appearances--it's possible that 
existing communities might "re-purpose" some of that code, but that's 
not going to benefit Android at all... Apache is non-reciprocal, so 
there's no obligation to republish changes to the original code, nor any 
barrier to using as much or as little of that code as one pleases...)

==============================

The media, can't live _with_ 'em, can't throw 'em down a flight of 
stairs....

--Lefty