Technology
Android Creator Smacks Steve Jobs With The Geek Stick [Updated]
Android creator Andy Rubin needed only 144 characters to respond in a Tweet Tuesday.
Their dispute is far from settled, but two things are clear: Rubin is a whole lot geekier, and Jobs is a very difficult man to argue with.
Here’s Rubin’s tweet:
@Arubin the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”Translation: open means you can do whatever you want with a piece of software, right down to downloading and modifying the source code. Nice.
The problem is Rubin reinforces part of Jobs’ critique even as he refutes another part of it: not a lot of people are going to understand Rubin’s tweet. Just because something is ‘open,’ doesn’t mean it’s accessible or usable.
Which leads to the core of Jobs’ argument: letting developers and modify an operating system’s code freely doesn’t necessarily make it more accessible.
Or as Jobs said Monday: “Google likes to characterize Android as open and Apple as closed. We find that a bit disingenuous… Android is fragmented… Compare this to iPhone, where every App works the same… the multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge…”
In other words, who says ‘open’ — or at least Rubin’s definition of it — is any good?
Nevertheless, Rubin has done a public service. Thanks to marketers who have embraced the word “open,” just about everyone describes their product as “open” and their competitors as “closed.” Rubin offers a concrete example of what “open” should mean, and every customer and developer Android wins over offers an example of how that approach can work.
UPDATE: Many twitterers don’t see terribly impressed with Rubin’s response.
Miguel De Icaza, founder of the open-source Gnome and Mono projects:
@migeldeicaza: I followed @ARubin’s instructions to get Android, and all I got was half a system. You can also get half OSX like that.
Matt Silas thinks that Rubin’s tweet makes Jobs point exactly: no one understands it.
No comments:
Post a Comment