If Google’s Android OS is open source, why is the company going after an Android developer? Because not everything that you think of as Android is actually open source.
CyanogenMod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ is an alternative, unauthorised, third-party version of Android for Android phones. As Android is an open source operating system, why has Google hit the developer behind it with a cease and desist letter? Because the Google Maps, Android Market, Google Talk, Gmail and YouTube applications on Google’s own Android builds are Android apps rather than part of the OS - and they’re not open source. That means Google has every right to tell the developer behind Cyanogen that he can’t distribute them as part of his build http://androidandme.com/2009/09/hacks/cyanogenmod-in-trouble. Google told Intel the same thing back in the spring when it was trying out Android on netbooks. Search, and the apps powered by search, are where Google makes its money and they’re not open source and you can’t use them without permission. Parts of the Android SDK are proprietary as well.
Microsoft has never seriously gone after the developers on sites like XDA Developers who create ‘cooked’ ROMs for  Windows Mobile devices. That might be because Microsoft makes its Windows Mobile money by selling licences to the phone manufacturers. There’s also the fact that many of the XDA developers work for phone manufacturers and mobile operators and have a fairly good understanding of what you don’t want a phone to be able to do - as least as far as the phone network is concerned.
The mobile networks have a rather ambivalent attitude to open source on phones. On one hand, anything that makes it easier to make powerful phones cheaply is good, because it costs them less to subsidise. Plus open source should make it cheap for developers to create apps for the platform. This is a big change in attitude because an open, easy to configure, easy to develop for platform is also very scary for the operators because they’re paranoid about a rogue - or just badly-written - app or phone taking down the phone network. That’s why the OpenMoko phone - a truly open phone - never got very far; the operators were just too worried about having it on their network.
Vodafone’s support of the JIL platform in the 360 launch shows that the networks have realised - with a lot of help from the iPhone app store - that having lots of apps on a phone is a good thing. The reason Windows Mobile looks so far behind in the app space isn’t that it’s hard to develop good apps for - although the mix of screen resolutions and Compact and Micro Framework versions certainly doesn’t help. It isn’t just that it’s too complicated to find, install and uninstall apps (I can’t find a good version of Spider solitaire from a site that I trust and I can’t find a way to get Windows Live off now that I’ve realised that having Hotmail on my phone isn’t worth it if it’s going to slow down the mail interface this much). It’s also that the over-cautious operators held back the first wave of app developers by insisting on lengthy certification and approval systems.

The operators are a lot more confident now (although there were still some nerves at the Vodafone 360 launch yesterday -  “Is opening up our network services like this a good thing?” asked one spokesperson rhetorically; “we hope so!”). It’s also interesting that despite being a member of the Open Handset Alliance, instead of following Motorola down the Android route Vodafone has put MotoBlur-competitor Vodafone People onto the LiMo platform instead. Linux Mobile (and Maemo and Moblin) aren’t just different flavours of Linux from Android (which Google says is built on the Linux kernel, but is not actually Linux); they’re Linux-based mobile operating systems that Google doesn’t control.

Handset manufacturers and operators like Linux phones for lots of reasons. They like open source for lots of reasons. But for an industry that contributes as much to UK GDP as the oil and gas industry, few of those reasons are connected with the philosophy of openness that draws developers like Cyanogen.

–Mary

When you install Windows 7 with IE 8, you’re usually going to get Bing as the default search engine - at least until you change it to Google. If you install Windows 7 on enough machines, you’re probably not going to get around to changing the search engine on all of them straight away. Sure it’s on the list with installing Office, and your favourite blogging tools, and ‘can’t live without them’ utilities like ClipMate and SpeedFiler (and in one case, downloading a 114MB NVidia graphics card driver file to get Aero Glass and flashing the BIOS on this Dell XPS M1330 to stop the display driver spinning the fan up to the speed of a jumbo jet); but between importing my extensive AutoCorrect definitions from my last PC and remembering the IRC addresses to put into Trillian, I’ve not got around to changing the search engine on a couple of my PCs. And when I have, I’ve actually considered changing back.

I’ll be honest, I’ve got most of my exposure to Bing through a game that used to be called Club Live Search (so yes, I do spend time at Club Bing, groaning at the pun). They’re fun little word and puzzle games that earn tickets you can spend on air miles (or donate to charity). And when you ask for a hint or fill in an answer, you see a Bing search in the bottom of the browser window. And over time, you start to get used to seeing related searches and your search history down the side of the page, and being able to hover over an orange dot next to a link to see the first few lines of the page previewed and being able to choose image results not just by size but by whether they’re in colour or black and white, a photo or an illustration, a picture with people in or not… You notice that, hey, Bing has a couple of useful features.

The kind of searches you do when you’re playing a word game don’t relate to the kind of searches you do for work (unless your job is writing word games), so it isn’t until you forget to switch your default search away from Bing that you also notice that, hey, Bing doesn’t suck nearly as much as it used to. I’m researching Windows 7 deployment tools and I accidentally ran the search on a newly 7-ized PC that still defaulted to Bing. I found what I was looking for on Bing, but I checked Google for comparison. Many of the results were the same, but Bing had more results about Windows 7 on earlier pages of results; Google had more results about a range of Windows versions on the earlier pages, it had more results from older pages (years older in some cases) and it had more irrelevant results overall. Google did find one useful link I didn’t spot on Bing: did you know you can use GFI LANguard (which I think of as a security tool) to deploy client software as well as patches? Handy to know now that there’s a freeware version that will scan up to five IPs…

Bing didn’t find it, because the page doesn’t mention Windows or Windows 7 anywhere and until I confirm that GFI LANguard can actually deploy an OS as well as an application I don’t know if Google was exceptionally clever or benefiting from synchronicity. I do know that if Google’s ‘all your data are belong to us’ attitude gets too irritating, I could probably stand to use Bing for searching the Web without complaining about it all day. And that really is a major improvement.
Mary

Have Google and Microsoft swapped places? Are Microsoft and Adobe going to race each other to open source key technologies as Google gets bogged down by antitrust investigations over Google Books? Not really – but Google is in line for some antitrust grief.

Welcome as the open source announcements this week are, don’t read the wrong things into them. This isn’t religion.

Adobe doesn’t want to open source Flash; it’s a huge business for them. They want phone manufacturers to pay to put Flash on mobile; but Apple said no and Mozilla and Google said ‘video on HTML 5, in Android and Fennec’. Adobe’s response was the Open Screen Project, starting with getting the chip vendors to support Flash and offering a ‘pre-integrated’ version of the Flash run-time. Taking it down to the chip level isn’t just about the multimedia support; it means that none of the hardware guys will want to miss out on a feature their competitors are going to have.

Adobe is swapping licence revenues on phones for ubiquity on phones; as Adobe’s Zeke Koch puts it “now you can have it for free - in return you have to make it open.” That’s open as in ‘Adobe gets to check it’ rather than open as in source. And it means users don’t go off Flash because of shoddy implementation, Flash stays in demand and Adobe can make money on the Flash development tools – and get in a few digs at anyone who doesn’t support Flash as not being open.

And while releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is a good thing both for Hyper-V and anyone who is fed up with the religious debates over operating systems and licence philosophies and Microsoft deserves credit for working through the problems, it’s possible Microsoft didn’t originally plan to release its drivers under the GPL. Supporting Linux in enlightened mode on Hyper-V is crucial; without it VMware can boast better support for more server OS’s. But according to a blogger who calls himself Linux Network Plumber, in the first version “the driver had both open-source components which were under GPL, and statically linked to several binary parts. The GPL does not permit mixing of closed and open source parts, so this was an obvious violation of the license.”

And actually, the most credit here goes to the anonymous Plumber who, rather than “creating noise” (and you can imagine the noise if Microsoft had been accused of violating the GPL) contacted Novell to find the right person to approach at Microsoft. Result: less of a news story, more of an actual result, grown-up behaviour all round.

As for Google, the EU has a hearing on Google’s acquisition on publishing rights scheduled for September 7th (expect the estate of George Orwell to have an opinion); the House Judiciary Committee might meet sooner than that. Google brushes both off as ‘fact finding exercises’ but Christine Varney  predicts “a repeat of Microsoft”. As the attorney who got Netscape’s case all the way to the anti-trust settlement, she should know.
-Mary

We recently met up with Jon Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO. During our conversation he talked about the philosophical difference between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Chrome, he suggested was “A window into the web”, marked by its lack of toolbars and its integration of Google’s web services.

This morning we woke up to the news that Chrome the browser is also the front end to Chrome the OS, a thin Linux kernel with a browser intended for netbooks. It’s not Android, but it shares some key concepts - and will run on Intel and ARM processors. There’s still a lot missing from what Google’s said, and much remains to be revealed when Chrome OS finally arrives on hardware - but part of me is wondering if Google has fallen into what I think of as “The Gilder Trap”.

George Gilder was sort of famous in the early days of the Internet. He wrote a couple of popular economics textbooks, and one of his suggestions was that wired and wireless would swap places. Data would flow through the airwaves, into pocket devices and all manner of mobile computing hardware. After all, in the air bandwidth was essentially free. Sadly he missed a trick or two. Bandwidth may be free, but the hardware needed to support it certainly wasn’t - and the back haul from base stations to the wider network needs to be hefty. Copper and fibre still remain the most bandwidth efficient way of delivering that last mile, and wireless data is really only just starting to get significant traction - and is already starting to creak at the seams, especially in busy city centres, as well as in the country. Even so, people still believe his 1990s words…

You may think the 50:1 contention ratio for your home DSL connection is high, but that’s nothing compared to the connectivity at a central London cellular base station. Your 3G data card may well be connected at 3 or even 7Mbps, but there’s often not more than a 1Mbps SDSL connection from the base station to the net - and you’re sharing that with everyone else. Trying to get email over a 3G dongle can be trial, especially at peak hours.

Now imagine having to do that with a million other people using Chrome OS-powered netbooks.

Sure, many of them will be hooked up to “free” WiFi connections, but don’t expect them to remain free for long when the costs of running the services increase with a sudden massive leap in demand. Cloud services are bandwidth hungry, pushing expensive UI functionality down to local devices. Google’s Chrome OS’s reliance on Google’s online services (even with Gears’ offline web functionality) will fundamentally change the economics of offering wireless services - and not in a good way for the network operators.

Gilder, like many of the proponents of free services, was right to say that the digital world makes many things essentially free to the end user. However, again like many of today’s freevangelists, he was wrong to ignore the costs of infrastructure. Yes, 0.01p is almost zero, but when a hundred million people are using that low cost service, that fraction of a penny quickly adds up into sizable amounts of pounds.

That’s why there’s minimal cellular data service in huge parts of the world, and why travelling on the Tube cuts you off. It’s just too expensive.

We won’t be “always connected” as much as we want to be - especially in the current economic climate. Capital and operating expenses are being slashed across the board, and even giants like Vodafone are looking to buy other networks just to get access to their base stations. Rolling out the network needed for Chrome OS to be everything that Google wants will take time, and will also take truckloads of money.

Always on and always connected are wonderful ideals - but that’s all they are. It took me a long time to realise this, even as I spent years consulting on massive wireless Internet projects. Chrome OS needs free wireless bandwidth, and that’s not something that’s going to happen for a long time - and a massive spike in demand is something that could push it even further away.

I’d like to be wrong. I like Chrome the browser, I like the Chrome OS concept - and I’m especially fond of many of the HTML 5 features that Google is building into its latest applications and services. The web needs an upgrade, and Google is driving that upgrade.

The web isn’t the only thing that needs an upgrade - wireless data networks (as much as Telstra and the like talk about HSPA+ deployments) need a massive amount of work. However I’ve come to know the restrictions of the mobile networks, and the economic realities facing their operators. Without substantial infusions of cash, that upgrade is a long long way off.

It’s a problem that affects us all - not just Google and Chrome OS. We’re being sold a hyper-connected online world where everything’s available 24 hours a day, wherever we are - what we used to call “Martini computing”: any time, any place. What we’re actually getting is wireless networks like AT&T and O2 which are struggling to cope with the minimal demands of iPhone users. How are they going to cope with bandwidth hungry Chrome OS users running their entire lives through online services?

Google could just have fallen into an old, old hype trap.

Google is a company that’s built itself on a basis of abundance - cheap CPU, cheap memory, cheap disk. Mobile operators manage a world of scarcity, and work hard to make sure that things remain scarce and expensive. They’re two diametrically opposed views - and Chrome OS is where they’re going to collide.

The real war isn’t Google vs Microsoft. It’s going to be Google vs the mobile operators. I’m just not sure that Google is going to win.

–Simon

The ’screaming deals’ Microsoft is claiming for Windows 7 are causing a certain amount of screaming - from people upset that they don’t get a pre-order upgrade price for Ultimate. That’s probably because Microsoft thinks of Ultimate as a ‘niche’ version; I’m not sure that disk encryption should still be thought of as niche, but if they did include it in all versions, that would be something else the EU would suggest might be an abuse of the dominant position of Windows, the way it’s complained about the inclusion of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft’s response to the EU is to take IE 8 out of Windows 7 in Europe. That means ‘upgrade’ versions for end users are clean install versions at upgrade price (with limits on not moving them onto a new machine).  The complaints for this will be aimed at the EU and Microsoft, with a few brickbats for Opera for causing all this trouble in the first place. The end result will be (we predict) a lot of people buying Windows 7 online from the US to save the trouble of re-installing all their apps, and a lot of small businesses deciding that as you can buy the Enterprise version of Windows 7 through Software Assurance for as few as five users, it’s time to switch to volume licensing - because SA versions of Windows 7 will allow in-place upgrades, on the grounds that when you have SA, you build an image with the components you want and if you don’t want IE you don’t put it in, so it was never forced on you and you don’t have to be given the choice. Microsoft is happy to use consumers for a game of brinkmanship with the EU over browser choice; businesses who mandate IE for internal use because they don’t want to rebuild line of business apps are too important to them for that.

What about the battle that really matters - what browser goes on new PCs? That’s up to the OEMs and they don’t care as much about choice as they do about cold hard cash, which is bad news for Opera again. Why so?

Well, OEMs have several browser choices. There’s the devil you know, the devil your customers know and the easy option - Internet Explorer and the Live Essentials (including the really rather good Windows Live Photo Gallery). Expect Dell and perhaps HP to offer this, along with a number of smaller ‘just hand me the CD’ OEMs.

There’s ‘we have a pot of cash and we’re going to use it’ Google; expect to see the Mountain View boys to pay to put their only-as-popular as Firefox 2 browser, Chrome onto the best selling version of Windows ever. There’s ‘would you like a nice deal bundling iTunes on your home PCs?’ Apple with Safari (currently neck and neck with Chrome). Firefox is free, which always appeals. And then there’s this little company in Norway that would like the OEMs to pay them money to put a copy of their Opera browser on new PCs. Sounds like Opera’s attempt to get more market share is going to backfire on them.

Taking a step back, do Europeans really need to have browser choice forced on them, at the expense of easy upgrades? Not according to the latest figures.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share - click through to see share by browser version

IE has more market share than Firefox in Europe - barely - if you group together all the versions of IE. IE 6 is slightly more popular than IE 8 (oddly - perhaps it’s all those IE 6 LOB apps). But the hand-down winner at nearly 36% is - Firefox. Perhaps Opera should complain to the EU about the Mozilla foundation?
-Mary

It’s not often that you get a standing ovation at a technology conference. That’s what just happened at Google IO here in San Francisco, where a team from Google Australia just finished unveiling Wave.

Wave certainly appears to be an impressive piece of work. Developed by the team that created Google Maps, it’s a radical reworking of the many different tools we use for collaboration - mixing IM and email with document creation and editing. Unlike most online collaboration tools it’s a real time experience - and it all runs in the browser. Communication takes place in “waves”, conversations and information streams tied to groups of online IDs - so each participant can be verified. New arrivals can scrub back through the history of a wave to see just what was said and by who.

Anything you type is echoed in the browsers of all the people you’re working with, as soon as you press each key. There’s no waiting for someone to hit return, everything is there as soon as it’s typed, so you can start your reply at the same time as you’re waiting for the last word to come in. Edits are in real time too, and anyone can edit anyone else’s text.

That last feature is ideal for document collaboration. The Wave user interface supports rich text and images, and there’s very little isolation between user edits. Two or more people can work on the same document just a few characters apart, with no locking at all. If you’ve grown used to the line or paragraph locking of most online collaboration tools you’ll find this an effective - and much faster - way of working. There’s even scope for inline commenting in documents, and as comments are associated with users, moving a document from one wave to another.

Google’s Wave implementation is only one possible Wave. Like Microsoft’s Live Mesh the real secret sauce is in the protocols. Anyone will be able to write a Wave server or a Wave client, and they’ll be able to federate with each other - so my Wave server will be able to work with yours in a (sorry, Ray) big mesh of Wave servers all over the world. The open Wave is an interesting place, and it’s one where there’s going to be a lot of innovation - even if it’s not just the Emacs client that Google demoed in the keynote.

As Google goes on to evangelise Wave with the rest of the industry (after several years of complete secrecy), it’s going to be interesting to see just how much uptake we see. It’d certainly be interesting to be a fly on the wall during the call Vic Gundotra says he’ll be making to Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie…

–Simon

Q. How do you get 4000 people to start developing for your mobile platform?

A. Give them all a phone.

No, that’s not a riddle - that’s just what Google did this morning at its IO event here in San Francisco. After a keynote that majored on the future of the web - specifically on HTML 5 - and only touched on some of the features in the upcoming “Donut” release of Android, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra unveiled not just one more thing, but three more things.

The first was the return of the Android Developer Challenge, this time with the added appeal of user votes. I’m not quite sure how The Web’s Got (Developer) Talent would televise, but the folk at Google seem to think that they’ve got the software needed to manage a large scale user driven voting process. Certainly tools like Google Moderator seem to have the user voting process working well - and it’s been heavily stress tested by hosting a White House electronic town hall meeting.

The second was a box that would be given to every attendee at the event, a box that would contain details of the Android SDK.

The third was what else would be in the box: an unlocked Android phone running the 1.5 “Cupcake” release. It was what Gundotra called his “Oprah moment”, not giving away a car, but more than 4000 3G devices with a month’s unlimited data (and a far chunk of voice).

It was quite an impressive giveaway, especially when the phones turned out not to be the familiar G-1, but the new G-2, the HTC Magic, which was unveiled at MWC in Barcelona in February. By the end of the afternoon most of the developers in the conference centre were clutching their boxes, and the 3G bandwidth in and around the Moscone Center was starting to get a little thin…

Of course it’s going to take time to see just how well Google’s bet pays off, but it’s certainly one of the more interesting gambits - and even more interesting considering the tough financial constraints many developers are under. If having a device to test code on is the difference between working with Android and working with Windows Mobile or iPhone, then Android will certainly pick up a hefty new constituency.

I suspect that Google will be watching the number of Android SDK downloads very carefully over the next few weeks…

–Simon

Or Windows 7, let’s hear it for the hardware; looking forward to WinHEC.

This is the only Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference before Windows 7 ships: unless the next WinHEC returns to its usual May timing that gives Microsoft another year to get it right. I’m expecting to hear positive things from the OEMs who’ve been playing with Windows 7 for much longer than we have; 7 is leaner than Vista and it literally puts devices ‘on stage’ with the Device Stage ‘experience’ (a task-oriented alternative to the AutoPlay dialog). And Ray Ozzie was very careful to frame Microsoft’s cloud play in a way that doesn’t ignore hardware.Google doesn’t give the hardware manufacturers much love, because it doesn’t have to, but for the first time since Paul Maritz left (and he’s now playing ‘who blinks first’ with server manufacturers at VMware over whether virtualisation will sell more servers rather than fewer in the long run) Microsoft has remembered how much the OEMs matter. The lack of drivers when Vista launched and the willingness to ship Linux on netbooks may have refreshed the Microsoft memory here.What’s good about the PC? Copy and paste, as I say whenever anyone asks me why I’m not packing an iPhone. And hardware. “Both Windows and the apps are sitting right next to the hardware, the processor, memory, graphics, and disk.” You can take advantage of a big screen in a browser app, but you’re wasting a lot of the power of the PC by not taking advantage of what Windows can do on the CPU. And storage is still much more efficient in the OS, as Ozzie notes there’s “immense value in the storage on PCs for confidentiality and mobility, for speed of access and local convenience for documents and rich media, photos, videos, music, and more”.