Comment by b112
14 hours ago
If Google doesn't smarten up, it will no longer be in control of Android.
Oracle was a mighty powerhouse when it bought MySQL, StarOffice, and more. It lost defacto control of all of them, due to its stupidity. In the world of open source, the tighter you hold on, the less likely you'll retain control.
And yet, here we are, with Google playing games.
Google, a note: there are far more relying upon Android than you, and now there are forced alternative stores in the mix. If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.
They can now fork, and force old Android to have their new fancy pants 'Play' store too.
Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".
> If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.
The OEMs are incapable of writing a competent operating system, and don't particularly care to.
> Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".
With what maintainers?
https://chrome-commit-tracker.arthursonzogni.com/organizatio...
> Oracle was a mighty powerhouse
It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.
as someone who is associated with “the big guys”, I can tell you this is changing.
Our Oracle license licensing went up so dramatically that the team I work with is moving some very large databases to postgres from Oracle because it doesn’t make financial sense anymore.
now, if we could only stop eating at the trough of Broadcom…
I hope so, I see some changes; far less than many seem to think here though.
Are they still forbidding benchmarking the Oracle database in their T&Cs? I laugh. Such litigious losers.
Postgres ftw. Long may it eat their lunch.
I'm advising a startup doing software for banks, and the overall attitude of their clients is: "We want to get away from the #&I$*@&^#$ Oracle, but we're stuck for now".
Oracle used to be a must-have because it was one of the few products that could handle transactions on a scale of a bank, with all the requirements for backups, redundancy, etc.
A fun anecdote. Back in 2000, I was present at negotiations (as a note-taker) where database vendors were bidding for a project for a factory control system. Vendors submitted benchmark results for various DB sizes up to 40Gb, and Oracle's rep hautingly said something like: "Our minimal size for benchmarks is 80Gb, so here are our results for that size".
And this was a _lot_ for that time. Now? It's so ridiculously tiny that you can host it on a smartwatch. So why would you pay Oracle?
Agreed, I had the same talks around 2000 but at the time it was still very much mssql/db2/oracle for 'real companies'. Yet i'm still surprised how much pushback we get, especially in Asian countries (India) but we do get it, a lot. And we have conversations with financial partners in the US as they advice our VCs; those calls go the same way 'ah, you are using that hipster open source stuff, yeah we don't do that here'.
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Google and Samsung have a closer relationship than ever these days, with cross-branded Google features even featured in advertisements for the last couple Galaxy models which would have been unthinkable back in 2012 or so.
They have their private own agreements with Google to secure whatever access they need to maintain their OneUI fork and are not the one making any public complaints. Samsung did have a love/hate relationship with Google that was openly simmering with resentment during the early years of Android but those days are long past.
Samsung already includes their own Galaxy store alongside the Play Store on all their devices, and have for 10+ years. But during that time have actually moved the opposite direction from your hypothetical fork scenario and both companies clearly view their current relationship as mutually beneficial.
Even though GrapheneOS and Samsung both maintain their own Android fork their views on AOSP/Google are not aligned.
I don't think so. Google's customers are phone OEMs and as long as they are happy, things will continue as is. The precedents here are Microsoft with Windows and maybe Apple with iOS.
Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.
> it will no longer be in control of Android
Who will step up to maintain it? Keep in mind that it has to be somebody that every other OEM trust. In other words it would likely have to be an alliance of manufacturers. And they'd inevitably treat OEMs outside the alliance poorly and we'd be back to the current situation, but worse.
Google's Android customers are phone OEMs. The major ones seem to like how things are going. Until Samsung and whomever start the OpenHandset Foundation or some such and fork Android, there's never going to be the Mariadb of Android.