It is now a couple of years since Android appeared on the scene. When it just appeared, it was a lone voice, the Open Handset Alliance, and went up against the industry behemoths (including Nokia, etc) who had put together the LIMO Foundation. LIMO has disappeared, and the Open Handset Alliance is no longer referred to. It is simply Android.
Over the last two years or so the number of people I talk to who want android has been steadily rising. It is reaching a point where anybody considering linux always asks if android is possible. No matter how under powered his processor, not even if theirs is a headless device.
So why do people line up for Android…
- Infrastructure for application download and install, aka the Android Market
- OS Update and Over the Air (OTA) updates
- Mature application development tools
- Free – as in beer! not as in Freedom!
Embedded linux flavors have simply disappeared in the last recession. There are today hardly any independent distributions out there. The lone ranger…MontaVista got taken over.
Sure meeGo came along…and got swatted by the Nokia-Microsoft partnership.
And now Android is slowly closing.
Quite frankly open source or closed source does not bother me. The important thing is an OS distribution that I (or my customers) can trust to develop on. Open source being closely associated with free (as in beer!) is actually hurting it sorely. Android has demonstrated that to build something big takes money, the kind that Google can invest (and partner companies can) but the cardinal rule of putting in money is that it needs to earn more that that was spent.
My take, the damage has been severe. So what’s the solution? Hurd?
Samyeer Metrani 