Monday, November 10, 2008

Open Source = Updates

As I sit here with my 4-day old T-Mobile G1 phone I am most struck by the updates, i.e. early and often. Even though, to me, it is a converged device of my iPhone and BlackBerry Curve and even with relevant hardware it is still the software, stupid. While my trusty Curve only had one OS update this whole year it still made me plug it into a PC via USB and download, backup, and restore. Ditto for my unlocked, jailbroken iPhone now running 2.1.

But on Saturday morning I received a message on my phone telling me that an OS upgrade/update was already available and even better - it was delivered OTA (over the air) without any PC and USB cable needed. Now to be fair it was shipped with RC28 and this update was for RC30 but for a new OS this is pretty cool.

Now for the kicker....the G1 runs on Google's new Android platform that is open source and the SDK is readily available for any who want to write apps/code/fixes. Sooooo that means that the software can be written by a community of developers instead of a proprietary group within a single company (no matter how large) it will never be bigger than a global community of rabid fans.

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