[cooldeal]

The chilling effect on Android forks is the same, while it is funny that the Open Handset Alliance doesn't seem to be really open. All the major phone OEMs are part of it, meaning that Android forks will have hardware and marketing support cut off from them.

>If they want to use Android in any way they want, they can leave the OHA.

And basically quit the handset market, as described in the GP post. Isn't that like saying if Compaq wanted to ship BeOS or dual boot machine, it could forgo getting the OEM incentives that Dell, HP etc. received from Microsoft?

[azakai]

> And basically quit the handset market

There are non-OHA Android products that are successful: The Kindle and Nook, for example. Those happen to be tablets and not phones, but I don't see a fundamental reason for that.

> Isn't that like saying if Compaq wanted to ship BeOS or dual boot machine, it could forgo getting the OEM incentives that Dell, HP etc. received from Microsoft?

Almost, but not quite.

First, Microsoft was an absolute monopoly in the market. Android isn't, but it is true that the main competitor is Apple which doesn't let you use their OS, so Android's position as a licenseable OS is pretty dominant. You could say that's not Android's fault though.

Second, in the Microsoft case, Compaq could ship BeOS but it would then have to lose all of Windows. With Android, if you ship Aliyun then you can still use core Android, but you do get that code later, and you also lose the ability to use the proprietary stuff like the app store and maps and so forth.

I agree these are not necessarily huge differences, there is still something to be said for Google having a tremendous amount of power here and is using it. But it is not quite as bad as things were with Microsoft.

[josephlord]

Whether Google is an absolute monopoly depends on how you define the market. It isn't a monopoly in the market for consumers to buy mobile phones BUT in the market for manufacturers to license mobile phone OSes it probably does have a monopoly position in the market.

WebOS, Boot to Gecko and even WinMo have fairly small proportion of the market even combined.

[recoiledsnake]

>Second, in the Microsoft case, Compaq could ship BeOS but it would then have to lose all of Windows. With Android, if you ship Aliyun then you can still use core Android, but you do get that code later, and you also lose the ability to use the proprietary stuff like the app store and maps and so forth

Wrong, Compaq would've lost the OEM incentives and discounts which would've put them at a disadvantage versus HP and Dell, but they still would've been able to ship Windows.

[ChuckMcM]

the Open Handset Alliance doesn't seem to be really open

This is sentiment is wrong. Building a phone OS takes a lot of people and resources, that is why you build a community to do it, anyone in the community can propose changes which the community can adopt or not, but the community as a whole benefits. So the OHA is completely open in the community of OHA members.

Alibaba should either join the OHA and contribute their concepts as part of their vision, or Acer should leave the OHA and go work with Alibaba on their own phone OS. But Google objected to Acer having its cake and eating it too, so what? I don't think anyone is being 'chilled' here.

[sabret00the]

In the same way that CyanogenMod does? Around the time of Jellybean's launch, Google released the PDK which made it easier and less intrusive to overlay the Android source code. As a result alpha builds of CyanogenMod 10 were in the wild before the Nexus S (or any branded device) released a Jellybean device. In fact, HTC still haven't even managed to get Jellybean on to their current flagship device. The only people stopping/slowing-down hardware support at this moment in time is the OEMs.

[donatzsky]

> Isn't that like saying if Compaq wanted to ship BeOS or dual boot machine, it could forgo getting the OEM incentives that Dell, HP etc. received from Microsoft?

No, since BeOS is not claiming to be compatible with Windows. If they wanted to ship machines with ReactOS, though, that would be a different story.

Google is not complaining because Acer is making phones with a competing OS (they make some WP7 phones as it happens), but because they're making a phone claiming Android compatibility that isn't really compatible.