Open Handset Alliance won't dictate much

Listening to the conference call now in progress about the Open Handset Alliance, it's clear to me that this is an open source play and not an open standards one, in the sense that the forthcoming work of the Alliance won't be under enough control that certain minimum requirements be satisfied by any one handset using that code. For instance, the code (licensed under Apache v2) could be used to build a completely locked-down handset. Also no one is dictating inclusion of certain functions -- for instance, offline access to Web-based applications as might be built using Google Gears or an equivalent.

There's nothing inherently wrong with making these decisions, but they will have long-term effects on the kinds of mobile devices this venture will yield. I'm not saying we won't see completely open mobile phones with offline access to all Web apps, but customers will still have to demand them, engineers will still have to build them, and sales channels will still have to deliver them. That much hasn't changed with today's announcement.

It does remind me how much standards, even open ones, often dictate what a technology must do. There's much more work to be done on open standards for mobile devices.