GEEKED: AN INTERVIEW WITH MIKE BURNS OF BOSTON ANDROID

Mike Burns met with me at the Black Seed Cafe and Grill near his home in downtown Boston to discuss what his group, Boston Android, is all about.

What is Boston Android?
Basically a collection of Android developers in Boston. People interested in software and hardware. It’s a non-profit and it’s mostly just a way for people to share knowledge in real time and meet each other.

So is there one particular project you work on at a time, or are people free to come and do as they please?
For newcomers, it can all be overwhelming; both for people new to the development environment and people new to the group. For them we tend to have a public community app (application), and that’s basically an app to teach the community something. It’s typically a very simple app. Some examples have been Umbrella Today, which is based on the UmbrellaToday.com website. It basically just tells you whether you need an umbrella today.

Any other cool projects in the works?
A large part of what we do is giving back to the greater Android development community as a whole. More than just Boston, we think big. Another example of a thing Boston Android’s working on, with other Android developers around the world, is a project I’m leading called Android Parts. The idea is: I wrote something called a date preference. This is a little tiny piece of your code that allows you to select a date. There’s no central place to store these and no place for developers to say “I need a date preference, where am I going to go for that?” So Android Parts solves that problem. We care about contributing back to the Open Source community in addition to the just the Android community.

Why do you have a group founded specifically around Android development and not some other technology?
Building an Android specific community allows us to create an intersection between the mobile community and the Java community. A lot can be done targeting that intersection, as opposed to targeting Java or mobile, as a whole. So then there’s the question of why Android instead of iPhone or Blackberry. The reason for that is I happen to own an Android phone and the reason for that is I really care a lot about Open Source development. Everything we build, every project at the Android community hackfest, is Open Source.

Could you speak a little bit to what Open Source is and why it’s important, for those who might not be familiar?
Specifically I care about Free Software which Open Source is a similar thing. Consider a table, right. You bought a table. You can resell it, you can modify it, this is your table. And it’s a similar thing with software. This isn’t just something for nerds. That’s something that gets overlooked a lot. This is something that can benefit everybody. By merely having the ability to look at the source code or the ability to modify the source code, you’re opening it such that you can be helped. So, for example maybe you have some proprietary word processor, you can’t modify the source code to it. There’s a bug in it. This is it, you’re screwed, right? If that company who maintains that word processor goes out of business, there’s no fixing that bug. But if you use Free Software implementation instead, even if you don’t know how to fix it, you can ask the Internet at large, they may have a fix for you. People have probably encountered this bug and fixed it. You can ask your programmer friends, they may be able to fix it.

So that’s Open Source and the rationalization behind it. I said that everything we develop is Open Source. That doesn’t mean it’s all free to download. For example Umbrella Today costs $2.00 on the Android Marketplace. You can download the source code for free, but in order to get the application from the Android Marketplace onto your phone, it’s $2.00. And that money goes to a few places. One, we’re licensing a lot of images and partnering a lot with thoughbot. Thoughtbot is a Boston-based web development company. Among other things they also do mobile app development. They also run the Umbrella Today website and let us use their space for our hackfests. So a small percentage of the profit from Umbrella Today goes back to them, and the rest goes back to Boston Android, funding pizza or whatever other food, printing stickers and tshirts, cool project ideas, hardware, stuff like that.

When you were talking about Open Source applications you mentioned Umbrella Today. You can buy it but the source code is also available for free. Wouldn’t that cut into sales, if people can just get the source code and compile it themselves?
In my mind, I know a lot of people in the Boston group have bought it because they want to contribute back to the food that we’re giving them and the space that we’re giving them. And by buying the app they’re giving back to that. And there’s the fact that it’s a pain to build software. That’s why Android developers get paid money, because it’s difficult to do. Just having the source code isn’t good enough to get it onto your phone, you have to know how to do that. And if you really care, then go right ahead. But I also feel that if you’re knowledgeable enough to know how to get source code on your phone, you’re probably knowledgeable enough to know that $2.00 isn’t that big of a price for someones time they put into developing the app.

Why is Boston Android based specifically in Boston. You work with developers all over the world, why the Boston name?
This goes back to the community thing again. It’s one thing to build a community on the Internet. There’s an Android chat room, there’s an Android IRC channel. But there’s 500-something people there, they don’t know each other … There’s only so much knowledge that can be shared there. It’s like “Hey, how’s you app coming,” not “Hey, how’s you life.” We are Boston-focused in that I feel that Boston’s a beautiful technology town. First off, we have a Google office over in Cambridge. And although I’ve never seen their people at the hackfest, the company that is in charge of Android is local to Boston. And there are tons of programmers in Cambridge and Boston, and there’s just so much technology stuff going on in this area, it’d be a mistake to waste that. I love Boston. I live here, it’s my home. And I want us to be a technology center, because I’m a technology person and I love living here. The more I can do to promote technology and commercial technology in Boston, the better. It’s almost selfish, right? The more I can do that, the better a chance of me getting a job in here or keeping my job.

True, that’s selfish, but drawing people here to Boston like that helps in other ways, right? More events, more shows, more people moving here to go to school, etc.
That’s true, there’s tons of college students, it’s a college town. It’s interesting you mention shows and music, I’ve been in talks with a musician who wants to build and Android app. It’s not necessarily about his band, although his band is very successful, but rather it’s about making music. That’s a great point. These are things you can do on your phone. Your phone’s not only for making calls and playing games, you can also make music on it. I know there’s a great music scene here. We have a Wii-J around here and crazy nonsense like that.

Wii-J, I’ll have to put that in there.
Why not an Android-J? Aside from the fact that the name stinks.

For more information about Boston Android, including dates, projects and contacts, visit bostonandroid.org