Google’s announcement of the Open Handset Alliance made my jaw drop due to the size, scope and scale of this undertaking. Coordinating and orchestrating something of this magnitude is breathtaking and only someone with the market cap and influence of a Google could pull this off.

A new, open source platform was announced: “Androidâ„¢ will deliver a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications. On November 12, we will release an early look at the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow developers to build rich mobile applications.“

Built on the Linux kernel, it is a complete mobile phone software stack. It includes everything a manufacturer or operator needs to build a mobile phone. Android will be made available as open source via the Apache v2 license which means that yes, it isn’t controlled by any single company and all players have to contribute back into the code base. There will be complete documentation and a software developer’s kit available on November 12th.

Here’s the game-changer to this anouncement — besides the obvious shared platform upon which multiple mobile phone providers can build — and why I’m so enthused by this announcement: in the same way that Apple has built the incredible value-added Mac OS X atop BSD unix and the Mach kernel, this provides the mobile telephony marketplace with the same opportunity to innovate atop Android. (From this Wikipedia article: The Apache License is a free software license authored by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The Apache License requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer, but it allows use of the source code for the development of both free/open source and proprietary/closed source software.)

Here’s what’s curious to me about today’s announcement:

[Read more...]