As ever a bang upto date follow up on Andriod (i.e. about a week late). See the previous post for disclosure and background (if you’ve been living under a rock).

First up; one of my concerns is that, given the non-reciprocal nature of the licence, it would require extreme discipline from all parties to not fragment the platform. Well fear not, ZDNet reports that everyone in the OHA has signed a non-fragmentation agreement

“All of the partners have signed a non-fragmentation agreement saying they won’t modify [the code] in non-compatible ways,” said the spokesperson. “That is not to say that a company that is not part of the OHA could not do so.”

Without seeing the agreement and not being a lawyer I have no idea how enforceable such an agreement would be. As ever the devil would be in the details – defining fragmentation, or ‘modifying code in non-compatible ways’.

Also on ZDNet is an interesting interview with Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google,

“The platform is completely open in a variety of ways. Of course it has open APIs, but it’s also open source, and it being open source means it’s (open to inspection).

So expect to have the entire industry crawling all over the source base, trying to make sure that there aren’t security issues, and there aren’t inefficiencies in how the platform is designed.”

But when exactly will we get to do that? Before or after the first phones ship?

The alliance is completely open. It’s not a closed thing; it’s not a club. We welcome anybody. Members who wish to join the alliance actually have to contribute something, so I encourage people to join and contribute.

So it’s a little unclear but it seems you have to contribute first and then get to be a member. Who decides? Google? Some percentage of the existing OHA members?

As ever with these kind of interviews it’s always easy to pick out something to poke at but this was too tempting;

Apple has a great business in building really, really high-quality consumer products, and the platform that we’re building can go into a lot of different products.

Including really, really low-quality products presumably.