Google delays release of Honeycomb source

I don't care as much about tech stories as I did, but this one caught my eye because I think some commentators don't understand it. Business Week, among others, is reporting that Google is delaying release of the source code to its upcoming version of the Android operating system. The release, codenamed Honeycomb, is intended to run on tablet-style machines that will compete with Apple's iPad.

"To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs," says Andy Rubin, vice-president for engineering at Google and head of its Android group. "We didn't want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut."

Rubin says that if Google were to open-source the Honeycomb code now, as it has with other versions of Android at similar periods in their development, it couldn't prevent developers from putting the software on phones "and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones."

The same article notes that big manufacturers already have access to Honeycomb's source code. If you don't write software for a living, that probably sounds like somebody is getting screwed -- namely, smaller developers that don't have the clout of, say, HTC or Samsung. However, it's possible, and I think even likely, that these bigger manufacturers have agreed to strict controls over how they may use or modify the source. More to the point, they're probably manufacturing the tablets for which Honeycomb is intended. The smaller developers who won't be getting access to the source for the time being are likely to be developing ancillary software or peripherals.

The trouble with the coverage of the delay is that it gives prominent coverage to those who see ulterior motives in such delays:

Eben Moglen, a professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, believes that Google is simply repeating the past mistakes of other companies that tried to put tight controls around the release of their open-source software. "It's usually a mistake," Moglen says. "Long experience teaches people that exposing the code to the community helps more than it hurts you."

Professor Moglen assumes that Google is delaying the release of the Honeycomb source out of a desire to keep total control over it. I think his assumption is out of whack, likely because he has never written software.

Where he sees a dark corporate conspiracy to back off from its commitment to open-source software, I see hacks that would be embarrassing for Google to acknowledge its engineers wrote, and costly for the company to maintain if external developers started relying on them. I've written software and I've worked with big source code bases. I know how easy it is for hacks to be introduced when deadlines loom. Not every first solution is elegant, but sometimes you have to ship with the source base you've got, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld.

Google is delaying release of the source, not reneging on its commitment to release it at all. Calm down, people.