News/Resources: Blog

It’s traditional in late December to take a look back at the past year and review the top stories, and there are plenty of pieces that review the developments in open source in 2011: Sean Gallagher’s article at Ars Technica, Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols’ recap of the top five Linux stories, and Mark Radcliffe’s take.

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For a time, it seemed that HP couldn’t give away its TouchPad tablet.  Then it killed the device and announced a fire sale liquidation.  Giving them away wasn’t the problem any longer – HP couldn’t handle the demand as the remaining inventory flew off the shelves.

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A couple of weeks ago I noted the conversation in the FOSS community over Google’s closed development of the “open” Android mobile operating system.  That debate was sparked by the publication of some internal Google documents that instructed its Android team: “Do not develop in the open.”

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Does “open source” mean developing in the open?  Or is it good enough – legally and morally – to publicly release the code after the fact, when the next release is ready for market?  Is transparency a defining value of the open source community, perhaps even the most important value?  Or is it equally valid, and perhaps a better business practice, to keep development closed?

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Yesterday Infoworld published a thought-provoking piece by Peter Wayner about the state of open source.  Wayner observes that the “open source” label is ubiquitous, but that the freedoms that open source was supposed to bring are much harder to find.  Many products are built on open source – the operating systems for iPhone and Android phones, for instance, are governed by open source licenses – but they’re locked down and/or kept in a “secret lair.”

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Some of my recent posts on the challenges of compliance with open source licenses have generated a lot of discussion in the FOSS community, as I hoped they would, and I’ll have more to contribute to the discussion in coming posts. But for now, consider this:

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It’s been a topsy-turvy week for open source in the mobile space.

Google’s Android mobile operating system has been marketed as “open source,” free for others to use and modify, in contrast to Apple’s closed iOS and Microsoft’s closed Windows Phone.  One of the defining hallmarks of open source software has been the free availability of the source code.

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You know how the old saying goes: if you are going to talk the talk, you’d better walk the walk.

Google has long touted Android as “open,” but as many (including me) have chronicled, it hasn’t been walking the walk.

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