E-Z Pass
Thursday, June 12 2008
If you drive on Northeast US tollways, you're probably familiar with the E-Z Pass: an electronic gizmo inside your car that lets you blow thru a tollbooth at 60 miles per hour. When marketers in the tech industry unveil their wares under the banner of "open," there are plenty of tolls to be paid: community scrutiny, skeptical reporters, tech bloggers and other OSS digirati. So where does Google get its E-Z Pass? Between OpenSocial and the Open Handset Alliance that was announced alongside Android, there seems to be no shortage of positive press coverage, centered in large part on the openness of these standards-based approaches to dealing with current Google complaints about walled-off social networks and walled-off mobile platforms.
Let's start with OpenSocial.
The idea here is that based on a common format, you can write apps that will run in any and all social networks that were invited to participate in OpenSocial. Google's rhetoric here is all about painting Facebook with the proprietary brush, and taking the high ground on being open for the greater good of the developer community. But Russell Beattie asks the right question in his Nov. 2 post: Where the Hell is the Container API? Jack Schofield piles on by pointing out that there's nothing open about it beyond that fact that anyone can write apps for it, just like anyone can write apps for Facebook, or Windows for that matter. In other words, while anyone can write to the OpenSocial API, only the inner circle of Google and its invite-only, self-interested buddies get to define what it is. Mark Cuban calls them "OpenSocial alliance members." Note to self: just basing your API on JavaScript and HTML does not make it an open standard. If Facebook were to join this alliance, as Google claims they were invited to do, then maybe there would be enough critical social networking mass to call it a standard of some sort, but 'open' it is clearly not.
Let's move on to Android and the Open Handset Alliance.
The basic idea with this one is that Google will offer handset OEMs a free, 'open' SW stack (OS, middleware, and a UI) called Android for running mobile apps from Google and others. Folks in the Alliance include hardware makers and telcos. Again, fairly liberal use of the "open" moniker, given that Google is developing it, seemingly without contribution from the OSS community. Despite the plan to release Android under "the most liberal open-source license ever given to mobile operators and handset makers" (Eric Schmidt, courtesy of TechCrunch), Google will effectively control the platform and distribution of Android into the marketplace. Om Malik simply dismisses it as one big PR exercise, and quotes Chetan Sharma, who observes that, "Of course, everyone wants to be seen supporting openness, proof will be in the implementation and the business models that support this vision, otherwise this is just yet another initiative."
A note of caution about the E-Z Pass lane - if you charge into it too fast, bad things can happen...
