Look But Do Not Touch - A Short Comment

[SheemOn Shapiro]

1.  First, I appreciate good, thorough article.  Even
     the English is mostly correct - a rarity in these
     days of "... there is many things ..."

2.  Your points were well taken, on the mark and
     correct, but...

3.  Google is a "for profit" corporation.  They are
     there to make money.

4.  Moreover, Google is a Silicon Valley young
     company.  They are single mindedly busy
     making as much money as fast as they can.
     They try to do it legally but will not harm
     themselves sticking to the letter of the Law if
     their analysis shows the choice is Between law
     and profit.

5.  Most their peers never bothered with ethics,
     morality, etc.  They know these words but make
     a mockery of them - for a good use.  Remember
     their moto "Do No Harm".  You do not hear it
     much these days.  Do you?  They are the big
     guys now, so why bother with nonsense.

6.  We cannot ignore the fact that the bottom half of
     Android has nothing to do with Google.  It is still
     Linux, pure and simple.  And Linux IS an open
     source, and will stay this way.

7.  The top half of Android is a clever bit, not too
     unusual Java runtime engine.  The credit for that
     belongs to Sun Microsystems (spelled Oracle).

     It will be a while before they privatise this piece.
     Even if they do, no big deal.

8.  The rest is a bunch of applications.  Some are
     good, some not so good.

9.  Finally, if Google becomes abusive, Android will
     be replaced.  In my short life I saw several
     companies try to stuff a software genie back into
     the bottle.  It never works.  Even if the genie was
     born in the bottle, it end up living outside.

Finally, just to put things in perspective;  when was the first open source
complete application environment put together?
I'll give you a hint.  I built my first such system, complete with all the
Google core apps equivalent on a 396 running at 16MHz with 512 kilobytes of
RAM.  When I upgraded it to 4 megabytes RAM and 140 Megabytes of storage, I
could not only use the system, but recompile it from source, all of it.

My point?  If Google will not behave it will be replaced.  It is easily
doable. All that is needed is the motivation.

Keep up the good work!

SheemOn
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