Thanks Dianne for replying... I fully agree its a difficult and
ongoing process. Particularly the choice of spending resources on
development vs ecosystem building is tough.
BUT I would argue that the carriers and device developers in the short
and defiantly in the long run would reap larger dividends spending the
resources now. Indeed this "good ecosystem" should NOT be built for
the "whiners" or occasional contributors in mind (this should just be
a side effect). A good ecosystem like eclipse is primarily targeted at
the large contributors allowing for less hand holding, more
communication, better bug resolution, better design up front and so
forth. Look at how IBM, Symbian, Windriver etc all develop products on
top of Eclipse without it becoming a mess. As Android is exploding
into new and different devices and markets it threatens to collapse in
on itself if the proper framework/ecosystem is not in place. As you
said yourself your already spending too much time hand holding the
device manufacturers etc now, imagine when there are 20 different
devices on the marketplace. The task to retrofit an ecosystem then
will be far harder and more expensive. Laying a good foundation is
NEVER a bad idea.
Indeed my company (now an enterprise member of Eclipse) would never
have gotten into Eclipse were it not for the great ecosystem, allowing
both the project managers, developers, system analysts, req analysts
etc etc to all understand and move the system forward. Its simple
things like having a mailing list, minutes of meetings, wiki's and
roadmaps for EACH project that really help the individual developer
both at HTC, Sony Ecrisson, Motorola etc and Google to work in tandem
to create a truely unique product.
On May 6, 1:21 pm, Dianne Hackborn <hack...@android.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Tim Labeeuw <Tim.Labe
...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Before even STARTING development of Donut I would spend a lot of my
> > resources on building a good ecosystem.
> It is just not feasible to significantly hold up development (and thus the
> shipment of devices that manufacturers have schedules to deliver and
> carriers have in their roadmaps to provide to their customers) for "building
> a good ecosystem."
> As I've said before: this is an on-going process. I hope that people can
> see things improving over time. It's not going to happen all at once, but
> it is certainly happening.
> > Putting the work now, will pay
> > far larger dividends latter when all the OHA members and enthusiasts
> > can easily contribute to the AOSP. Specially when OHA members can take
> > over projects from Google, freeing up the appropriate resources to
> > develop innovate new projects.
> There is nothing preventing people from contributing, though sure it is not
> as easy now as would be ideal. We are in the process of integrating CDMA
> that was contributed, and are starting to take in other features. This also
> takes a lot of time from current developers (such as myself), since for
> people starting to contribute there is a lot of hand-holding required to get
> code into acceptable shape so that it accounts for all of the things we need
> to deal with: well optimized to run efficiently, small size so it will fit
> on the devices, consistent with the existing code styles, maintainable for
> binary compatibility in the case of anything that appears in the SDK, etc.
> This also is just something that I expect to happen over time, as people
> learn to work on Android.
> To be honest, I care mostly about the people who are actually contributing
> stuff, much less the people who seem to just complain about how it isn't yet
> as open as they would like. (And that is why I try to avoid spending my own
> time posting on these threads.)
> --
> Dianne Hackborn
> Android framework engineer
> hack...@android.com
> Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to
> provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such
> questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and
> answer them.
