Google Opens Up Android Codebase

rsk writes "It's official: Google has Open Sourced Android. The source code can be downloaded from Android's Git repository. Bugs are handled at the Google Code Android project page with documentation being handled by a collection of Google Site pages. One of the more interesting aspects of Android seems to be the seemingly Eclipse Foundation-like organization of the project, welcoming both Individual and Commercial developers into the Android development pot. One of the benefits of this arrangement is securing the existence of the project by involving commercial interests and their money in the process ... this is also one of the downsides; having commercial entities charter and lead features of a platform that their own commercial offerings provide 'enhanced' versions of, sometimes leaving the free offering always lacking in one obvious way or another. It's hard to say at this point how involved Google will be in this process, or the Open Handset Alliance in general, with managing the health of sub-projects under the Android umbrella as time goes on."

Comments

2.1 GB??

[jonnythan]

I'm no developer.

Can someone explain why the source code for a mobile phone's OS would be 2.1 GB?

Re:2.1 GB??

[morgan_greywolf]

It's actually not all that unusual for the source code for an OS (or any project, for that matter) to be much, much larger than the resulting installable code.

Take a look, for example, at the Linux source. The kernel source is like -- what? -- 300MB?

The resultant compiled and compressed kernel on a 32-bit system is like 1.7MB.

So the source is like 300X the size of the resultant kernel.

And that's just the kernel.

Re:Allowing "Banned" Features

[Zach978]

They just ran out of time with Bluetooth. They also had to cut stereo bluetooth audio, why would t-mobile want to cut that?

Re:Let the porting begin!

[Em Ellel]

You might be able to port the framework to the iPhone, but you could never release it via the App Store.

Erm, the whole point of porting it is to NOT deal with App Store. We are taking replacing the whole iPhone OS with something else (BSD based OS/X with Linux)

Getting the OS onto iPhone is easy - thats how Jail-breaking process works, the real hard part will be writing the drivers.

Can't wait though - I was very disappointed since I found out G1 does not support AT&T's G3 frequency and that I am stuck with iPhone for a while. Android on iPhone would be a decent cancellation prize - at least until better hardware that works with AT&T and runs Android comes out. ....wonder if someone will port it to Treo too? There are number of linux drivers for some of those already.

-EM