In recent days there the issue of the US patent obtained by Apple relating to the multi-touch functionality has reared it’s head on the Android development lists, and the discussions have left me deeply concerned about whether Android will ever become a serious global player in the mobile OS market.
The discussion started rolling when a patch to add multi-touch functionality on Android was posted on the android-platform mailing list, and ran in parallel another list directly discussing the impact the patent may have, but surprisingly ended up with a post from a Google employee saying that patents should not be discussed on any of the google hosted android lists, and this was further expanded by another Google employee saying that it was “because of legal repercussions”, and “it is simply best not to know about them”.