There is an article over at Ars Technica about Google giving updated SDK releases to the winners of the Android Developers contest from a while back. The open question is where or not this is a bad thing and whether or not this is an open thing.

First, is it bad? I would guess that it's not bad. Google may be making experimental changes or changes that just aren't ready for mass release. They are probably just trying to get feedback from developers who they know are using it. That same group of 50 developers just got a small chunk of money from Google for Android development. So why shouldn't Google request they look at releases before they are made public? Why wouldn't Google want a smaller group to get feedback from on certain releases? A wider array of developers would likely just get frustrated with constant changes being made. No, I don't think it has to be bad.

But is it open? Not really. If Google had made it clear that finalists in the ADC contests would get access to pre-release builds of the SDK and a clear market advantage by having this access, people would have known and would have weighed that value in with the cash payments. For some companies, going after tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just isn't worth the legal overhead of all of the agreements and deals and contracts. (In fact, Google is one of these that often sees it that way -- they usually make a paid product free after they buy it -- Picasa? Check. Blogger? Check. FeedBurner? Check.) However, having even earlier access to the SDK, less stable or not, could be extremely valuable to some companies -- far outweighing the value of the cash from the contest. I don't think Google is being open right now, but ultimately the platform will either be open like it's supposed to be. Or failed. Will the rest of the Open Handset Alliance allow that to happen? Probably not as many are hardware companies and may have more capital invested than even Google.

If everything about Android is truly open, developers should be able to grab the entire source code to the SDK from some site (Open Handset Alliance?) and compile everything themselves to be able to use nightly versions of the SDK -- or even modify it themselves.

Will this hurt Android in the long run? Probably not. We just have to hope that the 50 ADC developers are giving good feedback to Google.

Posted by Shane on July 16, 2008 10:03 AM | Permalink