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Diversity: Google and Android's gain

Even Google may gain, at least from Amazon's move:

There is a web browser (of course), and while it’s styled a bit to match the Kindle UI, it looks pretty much the same as the Android’s WebKit browser. Yes, it has tabs! And yes, Google Search is still the default (the Kindle also has its own search tool to find content on your device).

That search box is what Google is mostly interested in; it's the basis of its entire business model. The Android project in itself makes no money; getting Google in front of people in the form of search or other services does. Provided Amazon sticks with Google for these, the latter probably won't mind much that its code has been forked. Arch-rival, Baidu, though, is quite a different matter...

Moreover, as the open source world has shown, competition has many benefits. Forking Android offers choice to users and encourages companies to improve their offerings rapidly and continuously – something they can't really do with Google setting the pace.

In addition, that new variety could help stem the growing problem of malware, which flows in part from the fact that Android runs the risk of becoming a massive monoculture in exactly the same way that Windows did – the same apps running on the same platform. Introducing a range of divergences into platforms and their apps helps stymie malware authors, who have to make assumptions about exactly what programs are installed on a platform in order to subvert both.

However, there are still some downsides to such forks. It's generally agreed that they lead to a dissipation of developer effort, at least at the operating system level. More flavours of Android mean fewer coders for any particular version. However, the flavouring is being added mostly in the upper layers, which are likely to be proprietary, rather than lower down the stack, which is where the real open source lies. That means the open parts will probably have much in common, even if the user interfaces don't.

Openness – or lack of it – is another key issue here. Again, the Linux component of the Android-based systems will be available under the GPL, but the distinguishing upper layers probably won't. Indeed, it's quite likely that the other Android components won't be released as open source since the main licence is Apache, which permits this kind of enclosure.

This means that the new Android forks could represent a considerable closing-off of the smartphone and tablet sectors, already less than satisfactory in this respect. The free software community will need to redouble its efforts to convince companies that the benefits of opening up code outweigh any perceived loss due to competitive issues. While Android is still relatively new, and its forks are only just emerging, it seems that the same old battles still need to be fought.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+. For other feature articles by Glyn Moody, please see the archive.

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