Lee Dale

Google, fighting hard for openness in China.

Android’s openness is legendary. They’ve used the word open in more Press Releases than any other company in the last 5 years. They’ve even tweeted and blogged more about openness than the Web Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and the Open Web Foundation combined.

Apple isn’t open like Google is open. Google wants everything to be open and is working with companies across the globe on adhering to standards of openness. Apple isn’t doing this. Apple may have a few open source projects they contribute to (but not anything that really matters), but Google is making sure their openness extends beyond just a few projects and into all of their relationships with vendors, manufacturers, distributors, carriers, and consumers.

Just yesterday in China, Google was helping Acer and Alibaba understand how to be more open, as reported by Dow Jones Newswires:

Acer, traditionally a maker of desktop PCs and laptops, has been diversifying into making tablet computers and other mobile devices, as PC sales remain lackluster amid the global economic slowdown.

The company has predominantly relied on Google’s Android operating software to power more than 90% of the smartphones it sells.

This is great. This is such fantastic open behaviour by Acer. Unfortunately, there’s more to this story:

Acer had planned to hold a press conference with Alibaba, China’s biggest Internet company by transactions, on Thursday in Shanghai to unveil the new smartphone called CloudMobile A800. The smartphone runs on software from Alibaba called Aliyun.

Oh, what’s that? Aliyun? Alibaba? Those don’t sound open. Those sound private. Just like Apple. But Google stands up for open. (Someone has to!) And Google doesn’t let people mess with open. So they’re helping Acer stay open with Android. As shared by Alibaba, Acer:

“was notified by Google that if the product runs Aliyun OS, Google will terminate its Android-related cooperation and other technology licensing with our partner”

Woo. Close one! Thank goodness Google is on top of this, or Acer may have made a colossal mistake using closed software! Now we can rest assured that Acer will continue to exhibit wonderfully open behaviour with all of their Android mobile phones.

This is great for China. Great for democracy. Great for consumers. Great for all of us. Thanks, Google, for fighting the good fight.