Apache license

David Herron has a thought-provoking post on his blog over at java.net, in which he shines a light on a potential pitfall with the Apache licensing Android will use.

As many analysts have pointed out, the advantage of the Apache license over the GPL is that it will allow developers to adapt Android code without being forced to give the changes back. This is obviously attractive to members of the OHA beholden to the proprietary software model.

But as David points out:

...what good is an "open platform" (as Android calls it) when customers can't be assured their app is going to run on any random instance of that platform? That is.. suppose Google/Android is successful and there's a couple dozen OHA phones out there. If each vendor is free to remove features and mix and match features, that leads directly to incompatibilities. That leads to an Aunt Millie who gets an OHA phone and wants to install OHA software which then doesn't run because there is no compatibility. What good is that?

Of course, by fragmenting the software in this way vendors are also giving up some of what would make Android attractive to the consumer. If a handset vendor, for example, implements some nifty new functionality that, as a side-effect, renders a certain class of third-party apps incompatible then a consumer looking for a widely-compatible platform might look elsewhere, to a different Android implementation.