The hoopla around Google’s Android mobile OS, and the resulting apps in the Android Market, is pretty strong. It’s laid on thick and fast. You know the drill; it’s “open” so it’ll be free from all the constraints imposed by The Man, etc.

Oops, maybe not. I’m not sure why people believed the steaming pile of hyperbole coming out of the “open” pundits, but it was just a matter of time before reality stepped in. Google has pulled tethering apps from the market.

There was no way this kind of filtering was not going to happen, and I said so here and here. In fact, in the latter article I even used tethering as a specific example:

Another example: Tethering is not allowed on the G1, but what if someone like, say, Nullriver posts a tethering app on the Android market place? Hey, it’s “open”, right? Who’s to stop them? Naturally, T-Mobile will go to Google to get the app pulled…

Despite what some may claim, “open” does not mean it’s open season on copyright violations or any other activities prohibited by TOS, contracts, license agreements, etc. We may want it to mean those things, but that doesn’t make it so. With all the advantages of a central app store comes the responsibility to police it. One can certainly argue that such policing is not done evenhandedly, or favors the larger partners involved, but this too is par for the course and beside the point anyway. The point is that “open” does not mean anything like free reign, and never did.

There are some who may argue this limits innovation, and while I see the point, I’m not sure I can agree. Certainly it doesn’t apply to tethering, which is hardly new. There is no innovation going on there from a software or hardware standpoint. The innovation needed from tethering must come from the carriers in how they handle this extremely useful feature (and that’s the subject of another article).

It’s hard to make a case for honoring contractual obligations or EULAs, or not violating existing copyrights, as being blocks to innovation. I see them more as blocks to questionable legal activity.

Meanwhile, the “open” community will probably condemn Google’s action, then deny it, then rationalize it, and then defend it. Finally, they’ll get right back to touting how “open” is the panacea; the cure for all that ails us, and everything Apple’s App Store is not. As before, they’ll be wrong, but I’m sure some will still believe it.

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Open Office comprises of several applications: a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation package (Impress), drawing app (Draw), and database tools (Base).

Some of the features heralded in the new release include:

• A new splash screen upon launch (see above)
• The ability to import Microsoft Office (.doc, .ppt, .xls) and Office 2007/Office 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) files (though it still isn’t possible to save to these formats)
• Support for sharing Excel workbooks
• Support for Excel sheets with up to 1024 columns
• A solver component for solving optimization problems
• Better polished crop and drawing tools
• The display of multiple Writer pages while editing
• Inclusion of Office commenting / change tracking in the document margin
• Some support for Visual Basic macros (a feature dropped by the Microsoft Office team)
• Enhanced support for PDF exporting, including password protection
• Support for Open Office extensions, allowing further features to be created by developers (similar to Firefox)
• No more reliance on X11

Open Office 3.0 is completely free to download and try out. If you are struggling with the Open Office site being overwhelmed with requests for the new software, it’s worth trying this mirror. Installation is far simpler than in previous versions and you can be up and running in a few minutes.

Let us know whether you’ll be switching from Microsoft Office!

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